By Mark Langabeer, Hastings and Rye Labour Party member
The BBC recently broadcast a programme on the attempt by the IRA to assassinate Margaret Thatcher at Tory Party conference forty years ago. The bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where many Tory delegates were staying, resulted in five deaths and twenty injuries.
As Marxists argued at the time, the bombing did not move Ireland one inch closer to what the IRA claimed to be fighting for, a united Ireland free of British influence. The effects of the bombing were entirely reactionary and served once again to demonstrate the futility of the IRA bombing campaign.
The BBC programme went right back to 1972, a year in which there were nearly 500 killings in Northern Ireland. It was the year that witnessed the Bloody Sunday killings, when British paratroopers fired on unarmed civilians who were protesting against British rule.
Patrick Magee, the organiser of the Brighton bombing, was one of those interviewed by the programme. He described Derry as being like a “war zone” and was among many young catholics who joined the IRA as a direct result of Bloody Sunday. He was later to become a bomb maker for the IRA.
The IRA on occasions did succeed in killing important public figures. There were the assassinations of Lord Mountbatten and the Tory shadow cabinet member, Airey Neave, both in 1979. However, they didn’t alter British Government policy one iota. In fact, the opposite was often the result, the killings acting as an excuse for more authoritarian methods to counter the threat from the IRA.
Concern for Thatcher’s wellbeing wasn’t overwhelming
Patrick Magee told the programme how he went into a pub in Cork on the evening of the Brighton bombing, to try to gauge public opinion. On the whole, he thought, concern for Thatcher’s wellbeing wasn’t overwhelming. I can confirm that from areas in South East London where I lived. Not long after the bombing, I visited a friend, whose mum was Irish. She tutted and went on to say that the IRA had “messed up” again. So there was no love for Thatcher, but nor was there any great enthusiasm for the IRA’s ‘political’ methods.
As she did on other occasions, Thatcher was able to use the Brighton bombing for her own political advantage. She insisted that the Party Conference would carry on as normal so she could present herself as a champion of democracy.
The programme interviewed Thatcher’s former private secretary who, at the time, couldn’t believe that there were no plans to alter the conference timetable. So the bombing gave the impression that Thatcher was a ‘plucky’ individual, steadfast in her beliefs, although we know that her claims of defending democracy are bogus, to say the least.
Later on, a spokesman for the IRA said that it was Thatcher’s obstinacy that delayed a peaceful settlement in Northern Ireland, but it had a lot more to do with the continued failure of the methods and policies of the IRA, which in the end were exhausted. Even so, the Good Friday Agreement may have managed to restore a semblance of peace, but it has not resolved the deep-rooted sectarianism, and even the NI Assembly is structured on religious divisions.
Ultimately, it was British Imperialism, and its policy of divide and rule that was responsible for the troubles in Northern Ireland, in which there were over 3000 deaths. Although the original reasons for the division of Ireland a hundred years ago have long gone, once it was created, the monster of sectarianism was not easily controlled. It will take a party of labour, with socialist policies, to truly bridge the sectarian divide.
The BBC programme, The Plot to Kill Thatcher, is still available on BBC i-player, here
