I love Northern Ireland and most of its people, and find it heartbreaking to see the province in the news today not in commemoration of its centenary year but once again because of vicious communal violence.
The law-abiding majority feel betrayed, and a new generation of young people is being encouraged by criminals to run amok, setting fire to buses and cars, throwing petrol bombs across the peace walls at neighbours with whom they disagree politically, and injuring anyone in uniform who is trying to stop them from wrecking the place.
Until the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement this kind of violence was so normal that it was often called recreational rioting. But, although it may have become less frequent, it has never gone away.
Letters
Most readers of the
Weekly Worker agree that capitalism must be overthrown, that this should happen as a result of the actions of the working class majority taking power, and that all Marxists should unite in one party with a programme along the lines suggested by the CPGB.
However, the CPGB stubbornly persists in urging all Marxists/socialists to join the Labour Party and fight within it to win members to Marxism. It frowns upon the setting up of any other party of the working class, which it always derides as being a “Labour Party mark two” and therefore doomed to fail.