British Policy in Northern Ireland: Between Activism and Consolidation

Abstract

There is reasonable agreement amongst historians and political scientists about the defining characteristics of government policy in Northern Ireland since 1969. In his The Irish Question and British Politics D. G. Boyce has argued that the recent eruption of the Ulster crisis in British politics ‘was not what it had been between 1886 and 1922, an essential part of the education of a whole generation of British politicians’ (Boyce, 1988, p. 10). According to Boyce, what had been central to British party politics at the turn of this century was, by the late 1960s, entirely peripheral to it. Neither the modern Labour Party, though heir to many of the prescriptions of the old Liberal Party, nor the modern Conservative Party, despite its direct lineage from the historic Unionist Party, had any wish to implicate themselves in the supposed alien controversies of Northern Ireland politics. The crisis of the second half of the century ‘was to be kept firmly within the neutral zone defined by “bipartisanship”: there would be no taking sides in this new phase of the Irish Question’ (pp. 11–12). The policy implications of this tacit understanding between the major parties of government have been continuity and consistency.