Living the peace process in reverse: racist violence and British nationalism in Northern Ireland

2014 – ‘Enoch was right’

In 2014, a series of events suggested that racism in Northern Ireland had been ratcheted up once more. ¹² At one level, the new ‘spike’ in racism in 2014 only marked a culmination of something that had been ongoing since the early 2000s – routine racism, widespread racist violence, the failure of a criminal justice response and much political posturing ‘against hate’ without much tangible anti-racist practice. But something had also changed. Racism had become politically implicated in a broader crisis in the government and the peace process and a specific struggle within unionism.

Why did this happen? First of all, the peace process and relative prosperity brought a host of new migrants, mostly, but not exclusively, from new EU eastern countries, which later included a more specific Roma migration. This made for a significant demographic shift – 10 per cent of children born in Northern Ireland in 2013 had a mother from neither the UK nor Ireland – and this population is overwhelmingly made up of people of colour and migrant workers. ¹³ The most obvious available cheap housing stock for this population is in loyalist working-class areas as a consequence of demographic declines and the continuing effects of housing discrimination and sectarian ghettoisation. In some ways, this process was similar to what happened in Britain a generation or two ago – in Stuart Hall’s characterisation, the ‘labouring classes of the satellite countries and the labouring classes of the metropolis [confronting] one another directly “on native ground” in large numbers’. ¹⁴ In Northern Ireland, all of the ‘confronting’ has been done by the ‘indigenous’ population. The relentless assault on people of colour and migrant workers has been ongoing in this context since the early 2000s. The ‘race hate capital of Europe’ characterisation reappeared in the latest widespread surge in racist violence beyond the focus of loyalist South Belfast to North and East Belfast, and to other towns like Derry, Larne and Portadown. ¹⁵

Indeed, Portadown in 2014 offers a microcosm of how this phenomenon works. First there is the generation of a new ‘mood music’. After one Unionist councillor had praised the contribution of migrants to the town, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) responded with an attack that framed the situation in terms of ‘swamping’. ¹⁶ This was ratcheted up again by the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), whose thinking is close to that of the illegal, paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), which demonised migrants in a press release. Almost immediately there were attacks against Roma in the town, after which some Roma families left. On 15 September, new graffiti on Corcrain shops (a usual signboard) announced ‘Roma Out – last night was only the start’ accompanied by a cross-hair symbol and a gravestone inscribed RIP. The message has been ethnicised in different ways across Northern Ireland: ‘Romanians Out’; ‘Locals Only’; ‘No Blacks’; ‘Attention landlords, leasing property to foreign nationals will not be tolerated’. But the underlying message was the same: people of colour and migrant workers are now ‘targets’ in Protestant working-class areas.

As loyalism and unionism began to confront this new black and migrant-worker population, they have not found themselves pitted against the imagined horrors of Republicanism or the anti-imperialist Left but, rather, the determinedly reformist, centrist and ‘cross community’ Alliance Party. This struggle was given a specific local dynamic in East Belfast when the Alliance Party won the parliamentary seat from the DUP in 2010 (unseating Northern Ireland’s First Minister and DUP leader Peter Robinson). This hugely symbolic defeat was at least in part consequent upon working-class Loyalists deserting the DUP. The DUP’s keenness to regain the seat has lent specific support to the need for a ‘rapprochement’ with working-class loyalism, including its paramilitary manifestations. Much of the racist vitriol has been poured on Anna Lo, an Alliance Party Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) and EU candidate, and the only person of colour in the Assembly. ¹⁷ Thus, when loyalists’ bonfires are erected (and left in place, mind you) with her face on the side and bearing the inscription ‘Anna Lo ate my Dog’, the targets have become about as ‘soft’ and ‘cross community’ as it is possible to be in Northern Ireland. Moreover, the minority ethnic population has traditionally been preternaturally quiet and has done very little to ‘take sides’ or make a challenge. If loyalists perceive the state to be under threat because of the presence of people of colour and migrant workers, it is their existence, rather than their politics or their behaviour, that is the problem.

In May 2014, this growing racism assumed new forms with a sermon from Pastor McConnell in one of Belfast’s largest Protestant evangelical churches. McConnell told worshippers: ‘Islam is heathen, Islam is satanic, Islam is a doctrine spawned in hell’. Lest this appear simply a theological engagement from the more militant wing of Christian fundamentalism, he made explicit reference to Enoch Powell and his infamous 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech:

Today we see powerful evidence that more and more Moslems are putting the Quran’s hatred of Christians and Jews alike into practice. Now, people say that there are good Moslems in Britain, that may be so but I don’t trust them. Enoch Powell was right. And he lost his career because of it. Enoch Powell was a prophet when he told us that blood would flow on the streets and it has happened. Fifteen years ago Britain was concerned with IRA cells right throughout the nation. They done a deal with the IRA because they were frightened of being bombed. Today a new evil has arisen. There are cells of Moslems right throughout Britain – can I hear an Amen? – right throughout Britain. And this nation is going to enter into a great tribulation and a great trial …

It bears emphasis that this kind of intervention has immediate consequences in Northern Ireland. As the Belfast Islamic Centre made clear, Pastor McConnell would be ‘responsible for any racial attacks on any Muslim in Northern Ireland’. And there were immediate attacks on Muslims. Despite these warnings and consequences, the First Minister of Northern Ireland, Peter Robinson of the DUP, moved quickly to defend the pastor. ¹⁸ Robinson said that McConnell had been demonised because of his remarks, that there ‘isn’t an ounce of hatred in his bones’ and that it was a duty of any preacher to denounce ‘false prophecy’. He then went on to say that he would not trust Muslims either, particularly with regard to those who had been involved in violence, or those who are ‘fully devoted to Sharia law, I wouldn’t trust them for spiritual guidance’. However, Robinson said he would trust Muslims to ‘go down to the shops’ for him. ¹⁹

There was widespread condemnation of Robinson’s intervention. ²⁰ Anna Lo said she was ‘very angry’ at the support given to McConnell. She said, ‘I do not feel safe here and I know many people who feel the same’. She said she was considering leaving the country ‘because of what might happen’ after what Mr Robinson had said, as the comments could ‘escalate even more of the racist tension’. ‘I love this country and I chose to live here. I am just appalled our political leaders are coming out and making such comments.’ The nadir in twenty-first century discourse on racism may well have been reached when Anna Lo was then accused of being ‘racist against the people of Northern Ireland’ by a DUP councillor (although this position was later repudiated by the party). ²¹

Thus, swiftly and without much strategic planning, we saw the political mainstreaming of racism in Northern Ireland’s politics. There were two key elements in this process: first, the long-term elective affinity between Ulster unionism and British nationalism; second, the realpolitik of a crisis within unionism, already in demographic retreat as the disproportionate growth of migrant worker and Catholic populations removed its majority status across the state. Within this intra-unionist dynamic, relationships with loyalist paramilitarism are key – despite their unambiguous unlawfulness, routine criminality and increasing identification with racist violence. This dynamic was brought into sharp focus by the ‘flags issue’ in East Belfast during the loyalist marching season.

There was much opprobrium around the flying of Ku Klux Klan (KKK) flags as part of the wider unionist/loyalist marching season. ²² Most observers know how to ‘read’ a KKK flag and they know that it does little to win sympathy for unionism. No doubt the popularity of the flags represents something disturbing. ²³ But the outrage around the KKK flags also missed the point. While the flags no doubt represented a threat to people of colour and migrant worker families, the KKK isn’t active in East Belfast. Flying a KKK flag is a crude symbolic identification with racism that is disturbing enough. Fortunately, however, the KKK doesn’t have the capacity to engage in racist violence in Northern Ireland. At the same time, there were hundreds of UVF flags in the same area – representing an organisation that was behind much of the racist violence and characterised by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) as involved in ‘ethnic cleansing’. This provoked no media frenzy, no outrage from unionist politicians, and no action from the PSNI. It is this toleration of ‘actually existing racism’ that is so dangerous for people of colour and migrant workers. This reality requires a much more immediate politics of resistance than focusing on the symbolic identification with racism elsewhere.

Finally, it is important to note that this new racist violence in Northern Ireland is asymmetric in that it is visited by white people on people of colour and migrants. Thus, the figures for ‘race hate’ both reveal and disguise. They suggest spikes but miss the point that this isn’t directly comparable with sectarian violence, traditionally characterised by perpetrators and victims on ‘both sides’. ²⁴ However disingenuous this may have been in practice, loyalist violence against Catholics and nationalists was always presented as ‘returning the serve’, i.e., a response to republican political violence. This fiction is impossible with new black and minority ethnic communities, who are migrant workers with no political project other than to try to build better lives for themselves and their families in an Ireland experiencing a welcome, if unusual, combination of peace and economic growth. Mostly, these new populations were filling a gap in the most marginal, minimum-wage sectors of the Northern Ireland economy, such as keeping the meat factories open and the NHS from collapsing.

The state response

Despite the level of media interest and the sporadic journalistic hyperbole, there hasn’t been a meaningful response to racist violence from the state in Northern Ireland. Neither the UK government, which retains responsibility for many aspects of security as ‘reserved powers’, nor the devolved Stormont regime, which has had responsibility for criminal justice since 2010, has acted effectively. While the idea that there has been a profound problem with racist violence in Northern Ireland is hard to avoid, the issue has hardly been acknowledged by government. If proof were needed of the symbolic unimportance of racism to the state, it was there in the failure to implement any race equality strategy for five years following the lapse of the 2005–10 strategy. This was the polity with a capital characterised as, ‘the most racist city in the world’ but with no race equality strategy at all!

There have been two key moments, however, when the mask of denial has slipped. First, in 2006, the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) recognised that loyalist paramilitaries were targeting ‘BME communities’; more recently, in 2014, the PSNI characterised UVF racist violence as ‘ethnic cleansing’. These episodes provide a disturbing indication of the priority given to racist violence, and the protection of BME communities, in the wider dynamics of ‘post conflict’ government. The IMC was set up by the British and Irish governments in 2004 with the avowed purpose ‘to help promote the establishment of stable and inclusive devolved government in a peaceful Northern Ireland’. It was to achieve this ‘by reporting to the Governments on activity by paramilitary groups, on the normalisation of security measures in the province, and on claims by Assembly parties that other parties, or Ministers in a devolved Executive, are not living up to the standards required of them’. ²⁵ Despite this specific responsibility to report on ‘activity by paramilitary groups’ and the widespread media coverage of loyalist involvement in racist violence, ²⁶ the only mention of racist attacks in the IMC’s initial work was a reference in the Third Report: ‘Members of the organisation [the UVF] were responsible for a series of violent racial attacks in Belfast, though we believe these were not sanctioned by the leadership.’ ²⁷

Later, in the Eighth Report of the IMC, however, came the remarkable acknowledgement that loyalist paramilitaries had opened another front and were ‘targeting ethnic minorities’. This bears emphasis, for loyalists were now identified by the IMC as being involved in a new dynamic of racist violence – despite the loyalist ceasefires, the peace process and the GFA. The initial silence of the IMC on racist violence was itself striking since the body was charged with overseeing normalisation, and the upsurge in racist violence could hardly be described as a move towards any kind of ‘normality’. But it was no less striking when the IMC finally decided to comment on the issue:

One important step would be for loyalist paramilitaries, including the UVF and RHC, to stop targeting nationalists and ethnic minorities. We hope the PUP will give a clear and robust lead on this. Another important step would be for loyalist paramilitaries, including the UDA, to stop targeting nationalists and members of ethnic minorities. ²⁸

It was odd that the IMC launched into this instruction to stop targeting members of ethnic minorities, given that it had never previously recognised that they had started this targeting. Nevertheless, the analysis was confirmed in the Tenth Report three months later:

We welcome [any move away from criminality] wherever it occurs but at this stage we do not see any significant impact on the behaviour of the [UVF] as a whole. Nor has there as yet been the positive move to stop targeting nationalists and ethnic minorities for which we called in our Eighth Report. We do not therefore change our overall assessment that the organisation is active, violent and ruthless … ²⁹

It might have been expected that this revelation would merit media coverage of racism in the Six Counties around the world. Yet it received almost no attention. Just as bizarrely, racist violence then disappeared from the radar of the IMC once again. It apparently found this targeting of minority ethnic communities of so little account that it never returned to the subject. Even if it believed this to be the case – and this would have been hard to sustain given the evidence – it never thought it necessary to tell us that these organisations had stopped targeting minority ethnic communities. It ended its mission without ever addressing the issue of racist violence again. Without any apparent irony, its final report was subtitled ‘2004-2011 – changes, impact and lessons’ and mentions neither racism nor racist violence nor the ‘targeting of ethnic minorities’ by paramilitary organisations. ³⁰ When seen against the background of IMC stridency on other issues, the implication was that racist violence is of little concern to the state or to its stewardship of the peace process. This began to expose the remarkable reality that racist violence has nothing to do with the ‘peace process’, despite the inherently contradictory implications of this reality. For this state, there is nothing problematic about a ‘peace process’ that is intimately associated with an upsurge in racist violence.

Journalist Mark Davenport provided context at the time of the IMC winding up:

The British and Irish governments acknowledge that there is ‘a continuing public interest in ensuring that the public are informed about the threat in Northern Ireland from terrorism. Once we have received and considered the IMC’s final report, the British and Irish Governments will do what is necessary to ensure that that need is met’. So it’s not clear what if anything will replace the IMC, and as the period before its inception suggested, the NIO may in the future be very reluctant to bluntly proclaim that a group’s ceasefire is over if such a statement is not deemed politically expedient. ³¹

For all these limitations, at least the IMC had acknowledged the issue in the public domain. But the point about what was to be ‘deemed politically expedient’ was prescient. In a context in which most key actors want the GFA institutions to survive, repugnance at racist violence tends to be routinely trumped by political expediency. Nor was the PSNI proactive in addressing responsibility for racist violence. It wasn’t until 2014 that it finally named the issue in terms of loyalist paramilitarism. But at least this PSNI intervention seemed unequivocal in a way that would force a new political response. In April 2014, the BBC reported this new analysis under the banner headline: ‘UVF “behind racist attacks in Belfast”’:

Police have said the loyalist paramilitary group the UVF has been orchestrating racist attacks in south and east Belfast … The Policing Board also discussed the violence in Larne, County Antrim, on Sunday by another loyalist paramilitary group, the UDA. Asked about the status of the UVF and UDA ceasefires, Chief Constable Matt Baggott said it was a matter for the government, not him.

In other words, in responding to questioning about the rise in racist violence, the analysis from the PSNI was unequivocal. ³² Given subsequent events, however, the process is worthy of exact record. When asked whether there was an organisation behind the attacks, Will Kerr, Assistant Chief Constable (ACC) Urban Region, responded:

There is a very simple answer to that … the answer is yes. We think that the UVF in east and south Belfast are undoubtedly behind orchestrating some of these racist attacks. Some of the motivation behind that is social housing based which worries us because it has a deeply unpleasant taste of a bit of ethnic cleansing in parts of Belfast and that should cause us all some concern. But there are undoubtedly links between the UVF in both parts of the city and some of these attacks. ³³

But the minutes of the Policing Board meeting significantly recast this evidence:

In response to a question from a Member, the PSNI provided the Board with an analysis of the motivation behind the recent spate of race hate crimes and the work being carried out to combat this issue. PSNI expressed significant concern at the increase this year in the number of recorded racist offences, up 43% with Belfast accounting for approximately 70% of the total increase. PSNI also advised the Board that work was being carried out to reassure victims, pursue investigative opportunities and ensure that positive outcomes in relation to hate crime were highlighted in the media and social media in order to send a strong message of reassurance to victims. PSNI also informed the Board that meetings have been taking place with other stakeholders to address the issue that certain areas of Belfast are not welcoming to visitors. Members expressed concern at the escalating nature of these crimes and asked the PSNI if local gangs or local paramilitaries were involved in the orchestration of these crimes. PSNI advised the Board that there are varying motivations for race hate crime including displaced sectarianism and criminal competition. ³⁴

Thus, a formal minute from a key peace process institution reformulated an explicit reference to an unlawful paramilitary organisation and a campaign of racist violence as ‘displaced sectarianism and criminal competition’ that rendered ‘certain areas of Belfast not welcoming to visitors’. This was only the most recent example of the failure of the state to engage with organised paramilitary racist violence. As long ago as 2004, the Equality Commission showed a similar reluctance to name the problem before the House of Commons. ³⁵ The trouble is that it is always someone else’s job – the Equality Commission wanted the police to do it; the police want the government to do it; and the government left it to the IMC, which was subsequently disbanded. Meanwhile, the ‘targeting’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ continued. This makes subsequent interventions in 2014–15 even more remarkable. Here we find key actors – from the Chief Constable to the DUP – apparently keen to distance themselves from ACC Kerr’s unambiguous analysis. ³⁶ Instead of a rush to address the enormity of this challenge, we find people desperately trying to put the genie back in the bottle, eager to kill this story before some of the international journalists get hold of it again. Little wonder – here is the proof that transforms the ‘race hate capital of Europe’ claim from hyperbole to measured assessment.

This makes it all the more important to emphasise just what the state was acknowledging, albeit fleetingly, in both these instances. There was statutory confirmation of what everyone else, including most significantly the victims and survivors of racist violence, knew already: that an illegal paramilitary organisation supposedly ‘on ceasefire’ was involved in an organised campaign of racist violence. This abruptly ends the comparison with contemporary England or France or Germany. Moreover, this wasn’t some symmetrical violence that could be grafted onto the community cohesion concept in vogue in Britain; it was a paramilitary group visiting violence on a tiny black and migrant-worker population. In other words, parallels with brownshirtism are not overly forced. On both occasions, this should have forced a crisis response in government and the criminal justice system. Instead, nothing was done. Here, the non-response of the state becomes a new form of ‘collusion’: the routinisation of the state’s refusal to name, let alone address, a frightening new form of institutionalised racist violence.

As the spate of racist violence first emerged in the early 2000s, we might have expected the new post-GFA state to turn to the blueprint provided by Macpherson, particularly since the whole criminal justice system in Northern Ireland was supposedly in radical reform mode. In this context, Macpherson offered a template from another part of the British state for improving criminal justice responses to racist violence – hardly revolutionary but practical for a state in reformist mode. Macpherson was, however, ignored almost completely by the state apparatus. ³⁷ The one intervention that supposedly looked at the implications of Macpherson for Northern Ireland managed to avoid the criminal justice system almost entirely. ³⁸ Instead, Northern Ireland was offered a new paradigm of ‘hate crime’ as a solution. The widespread portrayal of everybody ‘uniting against hate’ gave the impression of something being done. But its main consequence was to allow the police to rebrand themselves as being on the right side of the struggle for racial justice without changing their practice much.

The reality was that the policing and criminal justice response to ‘hate’ was pitifully inadequate. In 2013, the Institute for Conflict Research identified 13,655 ‘hate motivated incidents’ reported to the police over five years. Its report found that out of almost 14,000 complaints only twelve cases were successfully prosecuted using the 2004 ‘aggravated by hostility’ legislation. ³⁹ None of these was a ‘race hate’ crime. Even when other ‘non-hate crime specific’ law is employed, ‘each hate incident recorded by the PSNI has a one in 200 chance of being successfully prosecuted’. ⁴⁰ The state hasn’t gone out of its way to put this record before public scrutiny – it required an investigative report from the BBC to update the data in 2014. ⁴¹ The most recent figures provided by the Public Prosecution Service and the Director of Public Prosecutions suggest that there has been one successful conviction for racial aggravation. In other words, in the decade since racial aggravation was made illegal and in which the state itself had identified loyalist paramilitaries targeting BME communities in ethnic cleansing, it had managed one conviction.

The recent statistics do not look any more favourable. In 2013/14 the PSNI recorded ‘1,284 sectarian incidents, 982 racist incidents, 280 homophobic incidents, 107 disability incidents, 24 faith/religion incidents and 23 transphobic incidents’. Compared with the previous year, there were increases in all but one of the six hate incident types. Racist incidents increased by 232 (30.9 per cent). While there is general acceptance that there is widespread underreporting of racist violence anyway, the spike is indicative of something worrying. The way that the PSNI constructs its figures for ‘Incidents and Crimes with a Hate Motivation’ at least has the virtue of allowing no confusion between racist violence against people of colour and migrants and sectarian/religious violence. In other words the ‘racist’ incident category expressly excludes sectarian violence, which embraces essentially the whole of the population of Northern Ireland as potential victims. (For example, Polish migrant workers have been attacked for being ‘Catholic’ as well as being Polish.) In contrast, racist violence is focused on a tiny proportion of the population. These figures involve acts of racist violence visited on perhaps 5 per cent of the adult population. The state response to this upsurge was a telephone line to report attacks, which was subsequently withdrawn. ⁴² This new initiative on race was, however, somewhat compromised by the use of ORION as a code name. ⁴³ Whether this was intentional (‘Our Race is Our Nation’ is a KKK slogan) or a ‘computer glitch’, it suggested remarkable insensitivity on race. ⁴⁴

In reality, the criminal justice system in Northern Ireland has responded to the ‘race hate capital’ accusation by doing almost nothing. It put in place an infrastructure based on foregrounding a phenomenon, ‘race hate crime’, which isn’t a crime in law. ⁴⁵ Even when racist violence isn’t lost in the wider sweep of more general ‘hate crime’, this does nothing to address the specificity of racist violence. This is the Northern Ireland variant of a wider fiction – the notion that somehow states have begun to take racist violence seriously simply by undertaking public relations work around ‘hate’. This imagined vigorous state response sees the bundling of three elements that pretend to represent ‘racial hate crime’. As stated, the most important of these isn’t a crime at all in any legal sense; it is simply a methodology by which police record incidents. This is supplemented by the concept of ‘racial aggravation’ – which is a crime but which rarely secures convictions; and incitement to hatred, which is more likely to be used against communities of colour than racists. ⁴⁶

In Northern Ireland the state never addressed the lessons of Macpherson (which, of course, were far from perfect). We can speculate that the reasons for this abject failure on race across the criminal justice system in Northern Ireland were similar to issues identified by Macpherson: a combination of indifference, incompetence and corruption (accepting that each of these elements may have been informed, directly or indirectly, by racism). The indifference is based on what Macpherson might have recognised as covert racism. There is a notion that this ‘just isn’t our problem’. The incompetence is related to any ability to respond adequately to racist violence. The PSNI has learned to speak more sensitively on racism, but policing racist violence involves arresting, charging and convicting people. Here the obvious point is that the police should not be a removal service. Sometimes people have to relocate in the face of racist violence but it isn’t the job of the police to do this work as an alternative to protecting people in the first place.

Corruption is harder to identify for obvious reasons, and it would take something like a Macpherson inquiry to examine this fully. But it is significant that the most senior police officer on the ground in the investigation into the killing of Stephen Lawrence should be subsequently offered a role training the Royal Ulster Constabulary and PSNI (and move on to similar work in Palestine). ⁴⁷ More broadly, the incapacity to deal with ongoing violence raises basic questions about intelligence gathering and the use of agents within unlawful paramilitary organisations. When, for example, is racism excused because they are monitoring ‘more serious’ activity, or indeed, when it provides cover for other activity? There is some suggestion that racist violence is tolerated with regard to secret policing, which then allows an outlet for paramilitary violence as well as protecting sources. For example, the ‘no comment’ response in relation to a question about informant involvement in racist attacks contrasts starkly with the unequivocal denial in response to allegations that informants would be allowed to get away with drug dealing. Likewise, we need to ask of the reported ‘decisions issued for no prosecution’ that did not ‘pass the public interest test’, in what context is it not in the public interest to prosecute racist crime? ⁴⁸

This all raises the question of where this covert policing apparatus stands, in the context of the racist violence of loyalist paramilitary groups. Where are the informers and the double agents when people of colour and migrant workers are attacked by paramilitary organisations? Do they ignore racist violence or try to prevent it, or direct it in different ways? (Of course, similar questions around the priorities of policing and race now surround the Macpherson process itself. ⁴⁹ ) We have the nightmare scenario of organisations, well experienced in the use of terror, well resourced with weapons, systematically engaging in racist violence and working with the tacit imprimatur of the state. ⁵⁰ In this context we must insist that the emergence of ‘an acceptable level of racist violence’ policy would be intolerable – there is no political or right-based or anti-racist basis for such an approach to the policing of racist violence.

And corruption might involve omission as much as action. We need to forensically examine cases in which the prosecution of racist violence fails. The Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic Minorities’ Next Stephen Lawrence report contained detailed testimony from different survivors of racist violence. ⁵¹ Two stood out in terms of the failure of criminal justice. One was the case of a black person who was called a ‘nigger’ by an off-duty police officer in front of a range of witnesses and he, not unreasonably, asked how it was possible to raise his daughter in a society that regarded this as acceptable behaviour by police officers. Another case featured a perpetrator claiming membership of the UVF who threatened with death a black family in front of police officers. The man was arrested but then returned by police car to the street where the family lived; their house was subsequently firebombed. Whatever the context of these incidents, the failure to follow up cannot be justified. ⁵² These are only the most egregious examples of state failure. At present, the whole Northern Ireland criminal justice system is institutionally racist in terms of Macpherson’s far from revolutionary definition: ‘The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin.’ It is at present palpably failing to offer a ‘professional service’ to people in Northern Ireland on the basis of their ‘colour and ethnicity’.

British nationalism and the state in Northern Ireland

Shocking though the failure is of the criminal justice to respond effectively to racist violence, we need to look beyond it to explain the current dynamics around race in Northern Ireland. We might suggest two key elements here: state formation and the politics of racism. In other words, for the kind of open season on racist violence we find in contemporary Northern Ireland, there needs to be both a politics normalising racism and a state that underwrites this normalisation. ⁵³

In this sense, the crisis for people of colour and migrant workers is symptomatic of a wider crisis of the post-GFA Northern Ireland state. This is not just the take of ‘dissidents’ on the Left or Right. First Minister Peter Robinson recently suggested that the settlement was no longer ‘fit for purpose’. ⁵⁴ The question of why the promise of the peace process was so quickly dissipated is, of course, a complex one. But the emerging post-GFA state formation is a key part of the problem. The GFA settlement produced a system of government in which the two dominant political blocs in Northern Ireland – unionist and nationalist – govern in compulsory coalition. In consequence, decisions across government must be made with ‘sufficient consensus’. But this creates a debilitating ‘lowest common denominator’ approach to conflict; sufficient consensus forms only on the most asinine and least radical of options. All this makes Northern Ireland, post-peace process, a place of profound contradictions. It isn’t just that former enemies must work in government together. Nor simply that the system creates a context in which there is government without opposition, although this does tend to generate the blandest of policies in a polity that requires radical restructuring. Even more fundamentally, this state formation produces bizarre and paradoxical political discourse – newspeak for the twenty-first century.

These contradictions run through the response to racism: politicians condemn racist violence and then form alliances with representatives of the paramilitaries linked to that violence; the main NGO working with victims of racist violence is funded by the police; the main NGO addressing racist violence in loyalist areas is ‘close to the thinking’ of the paramilitary organisation identified by the PSNI as responsible for the attacks. This is a polity so self-deluding that it cannot see a politics of racist violence, let alone formulate a response to it. There is a degree of collective psychosis to this; people want peace to work so they are prepared to deny any amount of evidence to the contrary. Thus, we recognise that armed groups are ‘targeting ethnic minorities’ in a way that suggests ‘ethnic cleansing’ but remain relieved their ceasefire is still in place. A government that can agree on almost nothing else can, at least, agree on the need for ‘good relations’ – but ‘good relations’ involves an active denial of racism in contexts in which naming racism might create ‘bad relations’.

Northern Ireland then, is a perfect example of the profoundly reactionary consequences of the ‘good relations’ and ‘hate crime’ paradigms. First of all, the good relations paradigm hijacked anti-racism. The term was imposed on Northern Ireland by British civil servants through the Northern Ireland Act. It had not featured in the negotiations leading up to the GFA. In other words, the bundling of race equality with good relations was an import from the evolving British model. ⁵⁵ Subsequently, however, the British good relations formulation has included a whole range of ‘fairness’ issues, including class, within its ambit. From this perspective, its potential constituencies become so broad that it offers little more than a vague commitment to ‘community cohesion’ – not much more than exhorting everybody to be nice to each other. At least, however, it doesn’t pretend to be the principal strategy against racism.

What is so inappropriate and so dangerous about the contrasting Northern Ireland model is that it co-opted race, but excluded everything else. It integrated anti-racism into the Northern Ireland community relations industry, whilst exhibiting neither commitment nor competence to do anything about race inequality or racist violence. It seems that this co-option was accidental. What the state was really trying to do was undermine the radical human rights and equality aspects of the GFA by shoring-up the existing community relations infrastructure and giving it a key strategic role within the ‘post-conflict’ state. But the consequences in the north have been disastrous, for now all manifestations of racism are distorted through the prism of good relations. ⁵⁶ Everything is relativised, all culture is welcomed, but, in the process, the most offensive practices become normalised. We immolate effigies of politicians on bonfires and present it as a tourist attraction; we tolerate the genocidal imperative ‘Kill All Taigs/Kill All Irish’ on every gable wall; and yet no one connects this with our refusal to live alongside migrant workers.

Thus, when the First Minister suggested that the GFA settlement was no longer ‘fit for purpose’, he was missing the point that it is the state itself that fails this test. A state that was based solely on ethnic privilege – a ‘Protestant Parliament and a Protestant state’ – has not managed to reinvent itself through the GFA. Arguably, Northern Ireland has finally reached a stage where its racial foundations have begun to collapse. Demographic shifts in both the Catholic and the black, minority ethnic and migrant worker communities spell more than a community relations challenge, they represent a profound crisis of legitimacy. This is at the core of the ongoing ‘flags protests’, because the issue of flying the Union Jack accurately emblematises the struggle for the survival of a state based on sectarian majoritarianism, in which white Protestants are now in a minority. From this perspective, the contemporary Northern Ireland state looks unreformed and unreformable, and racism may well be the rock on which it finally fails.

Of course, the state is a problematic actor anywhere; in Northern Ireland this is true a fortiori. It decides what is policed and what is not; it decides what cultures are valued and what are not; it decides whose flag is flown and whose is not; and who marches and who doesn’t. But the state formation sits in a particular relationship with politics. This crisis of state legitimacy both generates and reflects a politics. And here the racism/sectarianism, old enemies/new enemies lines begin to blur completely. If you normalise the ethnic cleansing of Catholics, it’s not surprising if other, different, people are similarly excluded. If any ‘Other’ is seen as a threat to hegemony, it is a natural extension of ideology to throw out ethnic minorities from areas where Catholics have been and would continue to be thrown out; if the state institutionalises sectarian segregation through ‘peace walls’ and housing policy, it’s not surprising that racial segregation for migrant workers appears as a new and attractive option to ‘local residents’.

In the overall political context, it is important to remember that loyalism is a core component of British nationalism. This is an assessment of loyalism as a historical political formation, both as part of the politics of the British in Ireland and also of Britishness itself. It is anti-democratic, racist, authoritarian populism. Moreover, it isn’t simply something belonging to the most reactionary elements of the Protestant working class in Northern Ireland, it is a British phenomenon. In other words, it isn’t rooted in the most lumpen elements of loyalist paramilitarism – although these provide useful allies – but in the most developed forms of British nationalism. Its genealogy can be traced from Randolph Churchill, with his cynical strategy of ‘playing the Orange Card’, through Lord Claude Hamilton to Enoch Powell; from the Curragh mutiny to the Ulster Workers’ Strike. When the British establishment rejects the consequences of formal democracy, this is what it looks like: a toxic cocktail of racism, sectarianism, anti-Catholicism, unionism, jingoism, militarism and paramilitarism.

It has been there for generations, hiding in plain sight. Yet, despite their raison d’être with regard to nationalists and black people, it is rarely, if ever, that loyalist groups are characterised as part of what would otherwise be described as the ‘far Right’. For example, most analysis of far-right groups at the European level tends not to include loyalists. Yet it isn’t just Enoch Powell or John Taylor who attest to the connections. The specific reference to the far-right interventions in the flag protest movements brings this right up to date. The most obvious manifestation is the Protestant Coalition, two of whose front people came from the British National Party splinter group, Britain First. ⁵⁷ The elective affinity begins to look complete when we find that Britain First members, along with a roll call of others from the British far Right, are frequent attenders at Pastor McConnell’s church. ⁵⁸ And we need to put this in the broader context of a pan-unionist recognition of the appeal of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), which, though it also threatens traditional unionism, is now unambiguously integrated into the pan-unionist family. ⁵⁹

This linking of loyalism and British nationalism matters not only in Ireland but across Britain and beyond. Loyalism in Northern Ireland is a British phenomenon. Britishness must bear some responsibility for what is done in its name in Northern Ireland. Equally, however, Britishness itself is constructed around this nexus – Margaret Thatcher famously said of Northern Ireland that it is ‘as British as Finchley’. This connects with the broader point that what happens in Northern Ireland doesn’t stay in Northern Ireland: from the Special Branch to the Prevention of Terrorism acts, repression that emerges from conflict in Ireland has direct consequences in Britain. It bears emphasis that Race & Class has been among the few voices to make this clear, to insist that what was happening in Ireland has some reference and relevance to Britain. It is not an accident that when others on the Left saw it as having no reference to their analysis, black intellectuals and activists were able to read this correctly – with a consistent engagement, from Sivanandan’s historical analysis ‘From resistance to rebellion’ ⁶⁰ to Steve McQueen’s film Hunger – because so much of this reaction transposed directly onto black communities in resistance in Britain.

Thanks to this tradition, people across the UK should, by now, know how to make sense of people demanding to march with Union Jacks and associated paramilitary regalia through communities where they are not wanted. The key relationship here is with the state. Inevitably, in these situations, the marchers don’t just want to march, they want the state to clear the streets of any resistance to their marching. And this, we might suggest, is the litmus test on racism for any state. Does the state facilitate the marching? Does it withdraw tactically? Or does it prevent the march? The dynamic isn’t that different in Cable Street in 1936 or Skokie (Illinois) and Lewisham in 1977, or Tower Hamlets in 2014. The appropriate political response is ‘they shall not pass’ whatever the state decides to do or not do. The difference is that they did pass in Northern Ireland – again and again and over generations and generations.

Thus, there is a depressing circularity to the current stand-off around ‘flags protests’ across Northern Ireland and much the same dynamic was evident around Orange marches in Belfast nearly 200 years ago. But the lessons in terms of Britishness, loyalism and reaction are equally redolent. If people need any further help to get the point around the synergy of racism and sectarianism, it is there in the special ‘panel’ set up by the British government in 2014 with the sole purpose of forcing a march through the republican Ardoyne district. ⁶¹ The whole panoply of ‘Unionist leaders’ met with Northern Ireland Secretary of State Theresa Villiers to call for a parades inquiry looking at the issues surrounding Orange parading in North Belfast. The meeting included representatives of the DUP, the Ulster Unionist Party, the Traditional Unionist Voice, UKIP, the PUP, the Ulster Political Research Group and the Orange Order. In other words, the whole self-constructed PUL (Protestant, unionist, loyalist) community was there – including representatives of both major loyalist paramilitary traditions. ⁶² There, in essence, is the nexus of the state and racism in contemporary Northern Ireland. In this context, neither the secretary of state nor the other unionist parties were perturbed by their association with groups identified as ‘targeting ethnic minorities’ by the IMC and ‘ethnic cleansing’ by the police.

Conclusions

Since the 1997 GFA, the situation of communities of colour and migrant workers in Northern Ireland has deteriorated markedly – the broad climate is more hostile, the possibilities for anti-racist work more restricted. The First Minister’s public support for someone who insists that ‘Enoch Powell was Right’, alongside the PSNI admission that loyalist paramilitaries are involved in ‘ethnic cleansing’, present a bleak picture. At best, the criminal justice response has been to ‘unite against hate’, in practice this policy has been most evident in the PSNI policy of helping victims of racist violence to move out of their homes. Most of the positive lessons of Macpherson have been actively repudiated by the Northern Ireland criminal justice system. There has been an almost total usurpation of anti-racism by community relations – symbolised by the notion that racial justice can be reworked as an issue of ‘equity’ within the ambit of broader ‘good relations’. In this sense communities of colour have ‘lived the peace process in reverse’ – as it stands, the toleration of racist violence is now a crucial part of the price of ‘peace’.

What is so exceptional in Northern Ireland is not the depth of racism, frightening though it is, but the depth of its denial. Why are key participants, including the state, so keen to deny racism, to cover up racist violence, to defend the good name of loyalist paramilitarism? Put simply, most observers know how to read ‘racism’. The term puts an end to Northern Ireland ‘exceptionalism’ – the assumed incomprehensible intractability of the Northern Ireland problem. This is why the KKK flag in East Belfast came down when thousands of other illegal, offensive flags stay resolutely in place across Northern Ireland. Because after centuries of struggle, people know what racism is. People know that attacking people of colour or migrant workers in their homes is wrong; they know that the involvement of paramilitaries in this process is even more wrong; and they know that the state disavowing such racism is as wrong as it gets. The response to racism helps people see what each aspect of the Northern Ireland dynamic is about – loyalist paramilitaries, unionist politicians, the state apparatus in Northern Ireland and the UK state, which remains ultimately responsible for addressing racist violence. Once we frame the situation in terms of racism, especially campaigns orchestrated by unlawful paramilitary organisations, the reality becomes truly shocking. We find different actors – politicians and criminal justice institutions and racist gangs – colluding in racism in ways that remain unthinkable in, say, London.

The most immediate challenge is, of course, the defence of the communities under attack. Naming the problem is at least a start. We have to insist that a state in which people of colour are not safe from paramilitary violence in their own homes is not ‘at peace’. But this is a struggle that needs to be won for reasons beyond the persecution of the communities of colour in Northern Ireland.

There are two broader political challenges, one for Northern Ireland and one for the UK. The first is for Northern Ireland to find for itself some other less racialised raison d’être. Ultimately it is the state and not an unhappy congruence of ‘evil people’ that generates the conditions for racism to escalate. The comparison with South Africa is not inappropriate in this context. Somehow Northern Ireland has to imagine itself beyond race – no easy task. This kind of radical reimagining seems far removed from the contemporary politics of Stormont, characterised by a uniquely toxic combination of budget cuts and mutual contempt. Nevertheless, the contemporary post-GFA state must prove itself capable of decoupling from its core rationale of defending the ethnic privilege of white Protestants. Either it does this or the conclusion that it is unreformable becomes inescapable.

More broadly, this crisis of ‘devolved’ state power in Northern Ireland cuts right to the heart of a gathering crisis of the broader UK state. The resurgence of paramilitarised racism and state collusion in Northern Ireland deserves attention for its wider implications across the rest of the UK. For all its instability, the Northern Ireland state has survived as part of the UK for nearly a hundred years, and here it does present a warning for the wider UK community. In the wake of the Scottish referendum, the UK state is itself entering a period of profound instability. It may well disintegrate. If it doesn’t, however, it will mostly likely stabilise around new and dangerous political formations. A previous phase of imperialist reaction was constructed around the phrase ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’. The National Front used to argue, ‘The British Revolution Starts in Ulster’. There is no question that the Right will once again consider the part that ‘Ulster’ has to play. Many people are obviously worried by the project behind the rise of political racism in Britain: UKIP’s ‘repatriation’ debates or the Tories’ rediscovery of ‘swamping’ or Labour’s appeal to ‘British jobs for British workers’. When these agendas combine, we can be sure that the state is going to get even more repressive for people of colour and migrant workers across the UK. But we need to reintegrate Northern Ireland into this analysis. We find an immediate comparator for both the politics and the state formations that emerge from this kind of project. Northern Ireland is a polity in which the notion that ‘Enoch was right’ is met with a collusive silence rather than outrage and where the state rebrands the racist violence of paramilitaries as ‘displaced sectarianism and criminal competition’. It is a polity where it remains possible to generate a reactionary populist mass movement – across class, gender and generation – with an appeal to the integrity of the Union Jack. It is an ominous portent of what mobilised British nationalism looks like in 2015.