No. 345 NAI DFA/5/313/31/A
Extract from a confidential report from Frederick H. Boland
to Seán Murphy (Dublin)
'The British General Election'
(Confidential)
London, 31 May 1955
- Nowadays it probably doesn’t matter very much from our point of view whether there is a Conservative or a Labour government in power in this country.1 As long as the Labour party retained its traditional attitude towards Irish affairs, the case was different. But it threw this attitude over-board when it enacted the Ireland Act, 1949, and nowadays the respective positions of the two main British parties on the Partition issue are barely distinguishable. Indeed, so far as personal attitudes are concerned, men like R.A. Butler and Major Lloyd George2 are at least as sympathetic to our point of view as Labourites like Herbert Morrison — or Aneurin Bevan, for that matter. There has been talk of reviving the ‘Friends of Ireland’ group which existed in the House of Commons immediately after the war. I doubt whether the move is likely to come to anything. With some exceptions, the former ‘Friends of Ireland’ group had a decidedly Left-Wing complexion. Most of its surviving members are today strong Bevanites and Nye Bevan and his henchmen make no secret of their self-centred view that the possibilities of Irish re-unification suffered a fatal set-back when we showed our unwillingness to establish a Welfare State by rejecting Dr. Browne’s Mother and Child scheme!3 The same consideration, of course, does not weigh at all with the Conservatives. On the contrary, what is a fault in the judgment of the Bevanites tends to rank in their eyes as a merit. Many Conservatives would take the view that our distaste for State Socialism and our preference for a private enterprise economy, far from being a barrier to the ending of Partition, should tend to make the Ulster Unionists less disinclined to consider it. Whether they are right in thinking that all Ulster Unionists are as conservatively-minded as that, is another matter.
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