Letter from Frederick H. Boland to Seán Nunan (Dublin)
(Confidential)

The Partition debate in the House of Commons on 1st June had been awaited for weeks by all our friends here with pleasurable anticipation. Ever since the publication of Mr. Bing's widely circulated pamphlet, an opportunity had been sought for bringing the Ulster Unionists to book at the bar of the House of Commons on the charges made in it. The long-sought opportunity was now at hand; and the coincidence of the debate with the Royal visit to Belfast and the tension created by the bombing incident in Dublin¹ and other evidences of Irish resentment of the visit, added piquancy and significance to the occasion. The event sadly disappointed these anticipations. Even our best friends here sorrowfully admit that the debate was a failure and achieved little or nothing from our point of view. It seems to me important that we should try and analyse, coldly and objectively, the reasons for the débacle.

2. Chief among these, it seems to me, is the fact that the battleground chosen by the proposers of the motion was, from our point of view, wholly false and unreal. Their attack was not directed against Partition itself. It was directed against the discriminatory practices of the Tory Government at Stormont - its violation of civil liberties, the partiality of the police, the importance given to religious considerations in appointments and so forth. No doubt the sponsors of the motion had good reasons for this course. They believed, no doubt correctly, that a wider measure of support would be found on the Labour benches for an attack on the Tory Government at Stormont than for a motion expressly calling for the ending of Partition. Michael Foot had explained to me a week before the debate that, Aneurin Bevan having been a member of the Government which sponsored the Ireland Act, neither he nor his friends could now consistently give open support to a motion expressly condemning Partition. However good the reasons for the decision may have been, the consequences were disastrous. The debate wore an air of unreality and make-believe from the beginning. The only speaker who came near attacking Partition itself was Michael Foot, who pointed out that the Six County Government owed its very existence to a giant gerrymander. All the other speakers for the motion directed their shafts, not at Partition, but at Six County Toryism, carefully eschewing ­the question of principle with a false discretion which the Labour Member of Wycombe, Mr. Haire,² adroitly exposed when he pointed out that the attitude of the Nationalists in the Six Counties would be the same even if there were a Labour Government at Stormont.
3. The concentration of the attack on Toryism instead of on the wrong of Partition was, from our point of view, bad enough in itself. It carried with it the damaging implication that if there were a better Government at Stormont, everything would be lovely in the garden. What made matters worse however, was the undue emphasis laid on the factor of religious discrimination. For one thing, as the well-informed Lobby Correspondent of the 'Manchester Guardian' reported, the correspondence recently published by Dr. Nöel Browne had been circulated to all members of the House, no doubt by the Six County Information Officer. In the second place, the case made against the Stormont Government on the grounds of religious discrimination was not completely convincing; and, so far as it carried conviction at all, it was negatived by the arguments that Catholic local authorities in the Six Counties had discriminated against Protestants; that the low percentage of Catholics in the R.U.C. was due to the unwillingness of Nationalists to join, and that Catholic schools were treated more favourably in the Six Counties than they are in this country. Perhaps the worse consequences of the emphasis made on religious discrimination, however, was the confirmation it seemed to give to the idea which the British always have at the back of their minds, that the problem of Partition is essentially a religious one. Nothing pleases the Englishman more than to be able to conceive the Partition problem in this light and to indulge in himself the virtuous feeling that British policy in Ireland is based fundamentally on a desire to hold the scales evenly between two irreconcilably antagonistic religious sects. This was the feeling which the maladroit drafting of the motion gave the House of Commons last Friday and it presented the unctuous Mr. Ede and the Pecksniffian³ Maxwell-Fyfe⁴ with an opportunity which both gentlemen seized with both hands.
4. Although the drafting of the motion tended to put the debate on a false basis, this was by no means the only reason for its ill-success. In view of the fact that the Left Wing of the Labour Party have for months been using the religious discrimination argument as the main lever for their effort to pull the Partition issue back into British political arena, Dr. Browne's action in publishing the correspondence with the Hierarchy hit them a grievous blow. As mentioned above, the Six County Information Office spared no effort to bring the correspondence to the notice of Members of the House and Geoffrey Bing and others are satisfied that it prejudiced a substantial volume of opinion against them.
5. Another extremely prejudicial factor was the bombing incident in Dublin, followed by reports of other similar 'incidents' which turned out to be canards. There was first the report of the placing of a canister bomb outside a police station in Belfast, then a report of the intended explosion of smoke bombs in the Festival of Britain by the I.R.A., and finally the reported police investigation of an intended effort by six Irishmen to effect a unauthorised entry into Buckingham Palace. The extent to which the sponsors of the motion were embarrassed by these newspaper stories is shown in the alacrity with which the mover, Mr. Thomas,⁵ assured Lord Winterton⁶ that he deplored the coincidence of the debate with the Royal visit to Belfast. The House of Commons is notoriously a place of 'atmosphere' and even experienced Members find it difficult to make headway against an unsympathetic House. So effective were these newspaper reports in alienating the sympathy of the House from the sponsors of the motion, that it would not surprise me in the least to be told that the canister bomb in Belfast, the intended explosion of smoke bombs in the Festival, and the alleged plot to enter Buckingham Palace - all of which, as I say, turned out to be 'canards' - were deliberately contrived by the under-cover services of the Six County régime.
6. Another factor which, to my mind, contributed materially to the ill-success of the debate was the decision of Geoffrey Bing to wind up the discussion instead of seconding the motion, as he originally intended. He now admits himself that this was an error of judgment. It was impossible for him, without appearing a deliberate mischiefmaker, to take the offensive in his winding up speech after the unctuous and deprecatory utterances of Sir Hugh O'Neill,⁷ Mr. Chuter Ede and Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe. If he had seconded the motion, he could have raked the enemies' decks and given them so much to answer that the debate would not have suffered from the dullness which eventually characterised it.
7. These, in my view, are the principal reasons why the debate was not more successful than it turned out to be. In comparison with them, the undue length, prosiness and lack of point of Mr. Mulvey's unfortunate intervention, was perhaps a minor factor. I notice that in his column this morning, Terry Ward⁸ suggests that the suspiciously cryptic reference with which Lord Winterton began his speech is to be interpreted as meaning that there was an agreement before the debate started that the motion would not be pressed to a vote. I am assured by Geoffrey Bing that this is a completely false conclusion. According to him, after Mr. Mulvey had been talking for fifty minutes, having assured everybody that he would not take longer than twenty, a note was passed to him telling him to sit down; and it was to this action that the cryptic sentence at the beginning of Lord Winterton's speech referred.
8. It is a great pity that Michael Foot's speech was not given greater notice in the Agency messages. From our point of view, it was the best speech delivered in the debate and this is also Geoffrey Bing's view. Everybody knows, of course, that Michael Foot is Aneurin Bevan's principal lieutenant and one of the leading figures on the Left Wing of the Labour Party. I gather that the line he should take was discussed at a meeting of the Left Wing at which Aneurin Bevan, himself, was present. Although Aneurin Bevan did not intervene in the debate, the sponsors of the motion were considerably encouraged by his action in coming into the House during the discussion and letting it be known that, if there were to be a division, he was prepared to stay and vote for the motion.
9. I had feared myself that the comparative failure of the debate would have had a damaging and dampening effect on the morale of our friends in the House. Geoffrey Bing, though disappointed himself, assures me that this is not the case. He thinks we should look at the debate, not as an isolated incident, but as a stage in the process of re-opening the question of Partition as an active issue in British politics. He points out that the circumstances of the debate, as pointed out above, were decidedly adverse; but he thinks there has been something gained. For one thing, the Left Wing of the Labour Party, which he believes is in the ascendant, is now more positive and outspoken on the Six County question than before. In the second place, he thinks that the Ulster Unionists are showing signs of being conscious of the pressure, as indicated in their specific repudiation of the election utterances of Mr. Teevan.⁹ In the third place, he thinks that the Left Wing of the Labour Party is making converts on the question outside its own membership, and he mentioned particularly in this connexion the fact that Mr. Bartley,¹⁰ who seconded the motion, is the familiar 'stooge' of Sam Watson,¹¹ an important member of the Labour Executive, who has hitherto taken no interest in Irish affairs and would not have allowed Mr. Bartley to second the motion without his approval. Moreover, Mr. Bing says, it is a mistake to think of Partition as something that can be brought to an abrupt end by a sudden decision of the House of Commons. The best way to undermine Partition, in his view, is to discredit and break the forces which created and are responsible for maintaining it - in other words, the forces of Toryism. Although the Ulster Unionists escaped from Friday's debate more lightly than they should have done, Mr. Bing thinks the debate did do something to carry the process he talks about a stage further. He said he had direct confirmation from Mr. de Freitas¹² that the Six County regime were, considerably worried by the attacks made upon them.
10. I hope Mr. Bing is right; his great skill as a Parliamentarian undoubtedly lends weight to his opinion.