'WHAT WE have been shown by ancient Rome on a monstrous scale, is being repeated in England of the present day. The nation which subjugates another chains.' In these words Karl Marx spelt out to the First International the significance of British rule in Ireland for the British working class and for democrac in Britain. One hundred and fifteen years later this same truth has, in 12 months of heroic struggle, been brought nome women in Britain's mining communities.
The miners, and the women of the mining communities, have experienced a level of repression which is certainly quite new in post-war struggles in Britain. But it is not at all new in the British state as a wnole.
On the contrary, one of the most profound and, for the ruling class, disturbing results of the last 12 dramatic months is that a section of the miners and their communities now perience exactly what type of 'British justice' has been normally reserved for Ireland -recenny for britain s inner city Dlack communes.
A truly revolutionary change in consciousness has occurred as some thousands of men and women understood the fact that the 'chains' used to try to smash down their struggle for jobs and communities were 'forged' on the streets of Belfast and Derry, and in the fields of Armagh.
Once that fact sinks home its consequences are quite clear, and are perfectly formulated by Marx: 'Quite apart from all the phrases about national" and "humane" justice for Ireland — which are taken for granted in the International Council -it is in the direct and absolute interest of the English working class to get rid of their present connexion with Ireland. And this is my fullest conviction...
'For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy...Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. Che Enoish working class will never accomplish anything until it has got rid of Ireland...The English reaction has its roots in These words are equally relevant today. Virtually everything that has been thrown at the mining communities in the last year — from mass arrests, police occupations of pit villages, police riots, road blocks, the nationalist population counties in the North East of Ireland.
No one can convince the men and women who have been on the receiving end of these methods here in Britain that they are the means to fight isolated groups of criminals or terrorists. The miners know from personal experience that the methods developed in Ireland, and used against their strike, are methods of mass repression and intimidation against entire communities.
And if that's true in Armthorpe and other parts of Yorkshire then it must be equally true in Ireland -where the only distinction is that the repression is on a far grander scale.
In one go the undermine its own multi-million pound propaganda about Ireland than thousands of articles in socialist newspapers can ever do nation forges its own to interally Inousands of men and grasps irom personal exand more 'interBobby Sands' funeral