Loyalist Intifada? PSNI targetted in Loyalist 'Anti-State' riots!

national | miscellaneous | opinion/analysis Sunday March 05, 2006 20:06 by Sean - Organise!

PSNI targetted in Loyalist 'Anti-State' riots!

From WCR 11. We don't usually print articles from WCR so soon after publication but in light of requests made in the wake of the rioting in Dublin sparked by an attempted Love Ulster rally we are making this article available online at this time.

A Scottish comrade who used to live in Belfast decided, along with his partner, to pay the Belfast Local of Organise! a wee visit at the end of the summer. They arrived as Septembers Loyalist riots kicked off and as more violence than our comrade had seen in the couple of years he lived here seemed to occur in the space of a few short days. The riots intensified in the wake of a decision to re-route the Whiterock Orange Parade on Saturday 10 September. We say intensified because the UVF had already been orchestrating riots as a result police raids on a number of drinking dens associated with that organisation.

Kicking Off

While regarded, with good reason, by many as a planned attempt to divert attention from ongoing loyalist feuding and sectarian attacks on Catholic homes across the north it was the largely anti-state nature of the riots that demands a closer examination. Not that loyalism has ever had an aversion to taking on the British state (see page 8).

Meanwhile, from the safety of ‘nationalist’ North Belfast we watched the plumes of smoke rising from what looked to be Mount Vernon, while landrovers dripping fresh paint made their way up and down the Antrim Road to and from the barracks. Helicopters hovered over the Shankill, the Shore Road, city centre, and East Belfast. As we watched smoke rose into the air from further in the distance as things heated up over in the East. At one point, or rather over a good 5 minute stretch, some sort of massive, white, mobile HQ crawled past us at about 5 mph with sirens wailing, tiny blue lights flashing all accompanied by high pitched laser noises. The back doors were open to reveal rows of seats, and peelers at consoles in the back. “What the fuck is that?” our Scottish comrade asked.

The next evening we watched trough the window of a nearby pub, from over our pints, as more landrovers, Army and Police, many of them with scorch marks and plastered with paint, piled into the Musgrave Street barracks – one veteran remarked that he hadn’t seen anything like it since the eighties.

Panic – I Predict a Riot

It took a while getting home that evening but our visiting comrades were somewhat more inconvenienced the following day when they tried to make their onward journey to a planned romantic vacation in Venice. Cutting it fine already they arrived to get their bus to the Belfast International Airport only to find buses being cancelled as ‘I Predict a Riot’ blared over the intercom.

Panic ensued, frantic phone calls were made, taxis refused to take them so far out of Belfast in case they couldn’t get back. But one taxi-driver was eventually convinced to take our duo to the airport, so they made it to the book in with only seconds to spare – only for them to find that their flight was delayed!

Other people, mostly working class Protestants from the areas affected by the rioting, were faced with more serious disruption. When the buses and company vans ran out it was all too often cars and vans belonging to other working class people that were transformed into burning barricades, while many more faced inconvenience, uncertainty, fear and intimidation.

Class tensions at work

This violence was primarily anti-state with hostility being directed towards the PSNI, Parades Commission and the Government. But what really fuelled the Loyalist intifada?

The rioting was concentrated on poorer Protestant working class areas of Belfast, in areas that, like other working class communities, have gained least from the peace process and which have suffered worst from de-industrialisation.

Clearly underlying any sectarian motivation for the riots class tensions are also at work. Traditional industries that provided employment for predominantly Protestant skilled workers have relocated to parts of the globe with cheaper labour costs and little in the way of union recognition.

This process has been deliberately exacerbated by the acceptance of ‘neo-liberal’ economic policies by all of the north’s major parties. From the ‘socialist’ Sinn Fein to the Social Democratic and Labour Party, the UUP to DUP, even the working class loyalist PUP accepts such economic ‘realities’. All of our politicians have encouraged a process that sees the redistribution of poverty, as opposed to the redistribution of the wealth created by working people for the benefit of working people, while Northern Ireland’s wealthy elite gets wealthier.

Exclusion and blaming the ‘other’

Working class Protestants are feeling excluded, demoralised and they are losing out. Less than two in every hundred people in the Shankill – including mature students – make it to third level education. For many working class Protestants there is no way out of poverty or exclusion and all too often this feeds into not only the likes of last September’s riots but it also feeds into the growing ranks of the loyalist paramilitary youth wings of the YCV and the UYM. It is a situation that has, given the fragmented and increasingly sectarian nature of our society, led to demonisation of the ‘other’ community by a younger generation of working class Protestants and Catholics. It plays out in recreational rioting, increasing riots following Scottish football matches between Rangers and Celtic and in sectarian attacks carried out by young people on both Protestant and Catholic homes and communities.

Class not country

There is a sense that nationalists have benefited from the peace process, and this has been deliberately fostered by unionist politicians in a manner encouraged by the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement and the concept of Equality being promoted in the north. This is a notion that has been encouraged by Sinn Fein representing every minor concession as a major victory for their party and by statements that claim we’ll see a united Ireland by 2016. With no prospect of class unity emanating from that quarter its difficult to imagine exactly what they mean by ‘united’.

The truth is that the jobs that have brought unemployment levels so low are largely casual and low-paid – all working class people in the north are suffering the effects of poverty, lower wages, higher prices and an increasingly ruthless government onslaught on our welfare and services.

Only unity in opposition to water charges, rates hikes, education and health cuts offers any alternative to increasingly alienated and impoverished working class communities. Unionism or Loyalism, nor Nationalism or Republicanism, offer anything but more of the same, or worse, to working class people.

We have no common interests with British, Irish or global capitalists. We have no common interests with the politicians who enact economic policies that benefit the rich and penalise the poor – nor do we have common interests with those politicians who aspire to that role.

Unity worth fighting for

Some people, active in their own communities and often from loyalist or republican backgrounds have done excellent work to try and alleviate the worst impacts of poverty and sectarianism but we need to go further than this. We need to build a movement capable of breaking with the baggage and misguided nationalist notions of loyalism and republicanism. We need to break with the cancer of militarism that has blighted so many lives.

We need to organise as workers, in our communities and workplaces, to pursue our own interests as only we can. We need to make government and capitalism history in a struggle that forges a new unity – the only unity worth building and fighting for – class unity in opposition to all bosses and states.