Northern Ireland live in a complex social and historical setting and can best be left to work out our own social problems for ourselves’.188
The British civil service was inclined to agree with O’Neill. Whitehall’s mandarins shrewdly recognised, however, that they had to indulge their political master’s Irish obsessions. When he came to power, Wilson received a letter from the Nationalists requesting that he intervene to stop discrimination in the allocation of public housing. The ‘Prime Minister’, according to the inter-departmental correspondence, ‘asked that the Home Secretary should advise him how to deal with it not simply as an isolated letter but in the context of the new relations with Northern Ireland.’189 In light of ‘the interest taken in this matter by the Prime Minister’, the higher reaches of the civil service decided that it was ‘undesirable merely to follow without any modification’ the previous practice of simply ‘defining the constitutional position’.190
The rather limited research conducted by both the state and party bureaucracies emphasised the NILP’s reading of the situation.191 They studied a series of Guardian articles written by the party’s Charles Brett during early 1964. In these pieces, the NILP’s leading theoretician adopted a ‘plague on both your houses’ attitude. According to Brett, the allegations that both Unionist and Nationalist councils were allocating public housing to their respective supporters were ‘justified’. ‘In general,’ he concluded, ‘it appears that there is less deliberate discrimination on the part of the Unionist Government than the Nationalists allege; but in the sphere of local government, and in the private sphere, there is far more discrimination than the Unionists will admit.’ Brett detected that ‘Many Catholics and many Protestants are coming to regard the old deadlock with repugnance.’ However, the ‘Nationalists and Unionists are now under the control of their own extremists’.192 The implication was that there was an emerging moderate constituency – which would be increasingly drawn to the NILP’s centrist approach. With the party confident of advancing under the existing system, the leaders wanted their British counterparts to stay out of Northern Irish politics.193
The civil service’s report on the constitutional relationship between Belfast and London was also against intervention. It was noted that ‘successive Governments have taken the view that … it would be quite wrong for the United Kingdom Government to interfere in matters for which responsibility has been delegated to the Northern Ireland Government’. As regards discrimination, the report recognised that the Nationalist accusations usually involved matters that had been transferred to Stormont. Indeed, the Home Office’s existing procedure for dealing with letters alleging discrimination was ‘to outline the Northern Ireland Government’s constitutional responsibilities and to decline to comment further’. Similarly, if ‘the subject is raised directly in the United Kingdom Parliament, it runs the risk of being ruled out of order’. The report concluded that it would be ‘difficult to see how any departure from this view could be reconciled with the existence of the Parliament and Government of Northern Ireland’.194
Relatively early in this process, Home Secretary Sir Frank Soskice informed his civil servants that ‘the United Kingdom Parliament is still supreme and it may be the time has come to intervene in matters of this kind’.195 Less than two weeks later, however, the rudimentary analysis conducted within Whitehall had convinced Soskice that such a policy was impractical. In a letter to Wilson, he presented his ‘reluctant’ conclusion that ‘it would be constitutionally wrong, and most unwise in practice,’ for the government to ‘offer any comment upon or attempt directly to intervene in matters which clearly fall within the field of responsibility of the Government and Parliament of Northern Ireland’.196 Wilson dutifully dispatched to the Nationalists the reply that had been prepared by the Home Office civil servants: he stressed that the issue fell within the responsibility of the Stormont regime.197
A Westminster intervention would have seriously drained the Wilson premiership’s limited reserves of time, energy and authority. As Roy Jenkins – Soskice’s successor at the Home Office and H.H. Asquith’s biographer – warned his colleagues, embroilment in Irish affairs had derailed other reforming ministries.198 Labour had more politically pressing matters to attend to than Northern Ireland. The first Wilson government was defined by the balance of payments deficit, with which almost every crisis was inextricably bound up. American requests for Britain to support the Vietnam War, the seamen’s strike, the end of the military presence east of Suez, the 1966 wage freeze, and, the following year, devaluation were all linked to the unrelenting pressure on sterling. Jenkins’s time at the Home Office was dominated by the task of laying the legislative foundation for what he termed the ‘civilised society’. He would later admit that Northern Ireland ‘was about 12th on my agenda’.199 The next Home Secretary, Jim Callaghan, reached the same conclusion as his predecessors: ‘theoretically and logically we could have taken action, [but in] practice it was not … politically possible to do so’. It was therefore unsurprising that British policy was ‘to use O’Neill to put the reforms through and not in any circumstances to get our fingers burned’.200
Consequently, O’Neill made the pleasing discovery that his fears about Wilson’s intentions had been exaggerated. Following a courtesy visit soon after the election, O’Neill met Wilson on 19 May 1965 ‘to get down to realities’.201 The British Prime Minister’s recollection was that he had only been ‘anxious that the … Unionist Government under … O’Neill should be encouraged to press on with their programme of ending discrimination’.202 Acknowledging the Stormont premier’s achievements and suggesting rather than demanding further reform became the established pattern for later meetings. On 5 August 1966, Wilson and Jenkins ‘expressed understanding of [O’Neill’s] position [but] explored serious lines along which further progress might be achieved’.203 The British ministers raised the possibility of appointing an ombudsman to examine claims of discrimination in the allocation of public housing, the current state of electoral reform, and the feasibility of Stormont passing a religious relations bill. The debate, however, was perfunctory. This enabled O’Neill to wriggle out of making specific commitments. Indeed, he was able to convince the British that it was ‘politically impossible to make further moves at present’. Jenkins simply insisted that ‘any pause should be of short duration’ and warned that ‘a return to unenlightened policies could mean Westminster “taking over”’.204
O’Neill’s success in claiming that the rise in extremist activity demanded a temporary halt to his reform programme reflected the recent IRA scare. In December 1965, O’Neill had alerted Soskice that he had ‘been advised by the R.U.C. that preparations are on foot for an early assumption of I.R.A. activities in Northern Ireland’. He stressed that the intelligence that had been acquired included ‘refer-ences to the perpetration of I.R.A. outrages in England’.205 As the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising approached, Soskice became increasingly nervous. ‘Information received from both Scotland Yard and the Northern Ireland Government’, he told Wilson in early April 1966, ‘shows that the threat is a real one.’ The British government responded by sending over ‘an additional infantry battalion ostensibly for training’.206 Violence did follow in the wake of the Easter Rising commemoration, but it was perpetrated by loyalists rather than Republicans. Westminster was therefore reluctant to weaken O’Neill’s position still further and risk this perceived reformer being replaced by a reactionary. A memorandum written in preparation for the talks outlined London’s thinking:
O’Neill has pursued a markedly more liberal line than his predecessors … there is no doubt that … O’Neill is running some political risk … Any action taken by the Westminster Government that implied that the present Northern Ireland Government did not enjoy its confidence would encourage the extremist elements which are opposed to the existence of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. It would also have an effect on the Unionist Party itself and would probably bring more extreme elements there also.207
The Stormont premier, however, confessed to his Cabinet that by playing to Westminster’s sympathy for his difficulties he had merely ‘bought time’.208
Following the September
