The Fight For a United Ireland

Geoff Bell of Labour for Irish Unity is on the Labour Left Podcast.

Bryn Griffiths, of the Labour Left Podcast, suggests that a new generation of socialist activists can learn an enormous amount from the Irish struggle.  If you’re a Palestinian activist today and you are trying to understand why the Labour Party is so bad on Palestine there’s no better place to start than Britain’s colonial history in Ireland.  Plot spoiler – unfortunately, Labour and much of the left has an appalling history when it comes to imperialism.

Geoff Bell is part of Labour for Irish Unity.  He is an outstanding historian of the troubles; but more than that he has decades of experience as an Irish activist in Britain fighting for a united Ireland.  His most famous book, published in 1976, and reprinted five times is The Protestants of Ulster.  More recently, he has published Hesitant Comrades and The Twilight of Unionism. He is an organic intellectual in the truly Gramscian sense of the term.

The podcast will give socialists an excellent grounding in modern Irish history and along the way you’ll hear stories of minding Vanessa Redgrave, fighting in the Bogside alongside Bernadette Devlin, carrying Eamon McCann’s megaphone, Neil Kinnock trying to torpedo Geoff’s Channel Four Documentary and being followed by police spies whilst driving Gerry Adams.

Geoff explained in Michael Farrell’s Twenty Years On, published in 1988, that during the events in Derry of the late sixties and early seventies he “gained a political education the like of which few contemporary European Socialists have had the privilege of receiving.”  In this episode of the Labour Left Podcast, you find out why.

Marching in London during the 1990s  to mark Bloody Sunday and demand Britian out of Ireland. Photo: Bryn Griffiths.

Towards the end of the podcast Geoff talks about what could be the final stages of the struggle for Irish Unity.  Geoff ends by setting British socialists some important tasks to help make sure that both Geoff and myself get to see a United Ireland in our lifetimes.

If you’re new to the Labour Left Podcast, please take a look at our back catalogue.  Previous episodes have included a conversation with Compass’s Neal Lawson; Rachel Shabi talking about her book The Truth About Antisemitism;  Bernard Regan of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign;  Prof Harvey J Kaye on the legacy of the Communist Historians; Prof Corinne Fowler, talking about her book Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain; Andrew Fisher telling the story behind For the Many Not the Few, Labour’s 2017 manifesto; Jeremy Gilbert, a Professor of Cultural and Political Theory, a champion of Gramsci, talking about Thatcherism; episodes with Mish Rahman, Rachel Godfrey Wood and Hilary Schan on the contemporary Labour Left; Mike Phipps, author of Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, taking a long term look at the Labour Left;  Mike Jackson, co-founder of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, on the Great 1984-85 Miners’ Strike; political activist Liz Davies telling her story as the dissenter within Blair’s New Labour; Rachel Garnham, a current co-Chair of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy looking back at the history of the fight for democracy in the British Labour Party; and finally myself telling the story of Brighton Labour Briefing, a local Bennite magazine of the 1980s.

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You can watch the podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts here, Audible here and listen to it on Spotify here  If your favourite podcast site isn’t listed, just search for the Labour Left Podcast. 

Bryn Griffiths is an activist in Colchester Labour Party and North Essex World Transformed. He is the Vice-Chair of Momentum and sits on the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’s Executive. 

Bryn hosts Labour Hub’s spin off – the Labour Left Podcast.  You can find all the episodes of the podcast here  or if you prefer audio platforms (for example Amazon, Audible Spotify, Apple etc,) go to your favourite podcast provider and just search for the Labour Left Podcast.