gunfights but no institutions of government. There was no parliament, no high court, no departments, no senior officials, and no plan. Displaying the discipline, diligence, and determination upon which bureaucrats pride themselves, Clark helped to conjure a state out of thin air. He organised the elections to the new devolved Parliament; he devised a comprehensive scheme setting out the new Ministries and the staff needed to operate them; he ensured that the four British principles of anonymity, confidentiality, impartiality, and incorruptibility were adopted; and he found – mainly in London and in Dublin – the experienced personnel required to work the new machinery of government.25 In 1924, Clark told the first annual dinner of the new civil service that the ‘Government of Ulster is the child of its people, and if the Ministers and their Parliamentary Secretaries are its Godfathers and Godmothers, we are certainly its nurses’.26 As Northern Ireland grew into adolescence, the civil service nursed its ward through the Great Depression. In the words of one official, it carried on ‘an administration as good, as liberal, and as humane as political conditions allowed’.27 Those final four words are telling – the Unionist godfathers never allowed their civil servants to do anything that could jeopardise their party’s control.
Clark’s successor as head of the Northern Ireland civil service was a man whose many enthusiasms included the German constitution.28 This attempt to reconcile liberal parliamentarianism with mass democracy excited people across Europe. The keenest student of the new Weimar order was the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Liberal constitutionalism, he argued, was trying to hide the fact that politics lies behind the law. As the chaos that followed the First World War demonstrated, it was impossible to write a constitution that could foresee and foreclose every crisis. ‘In the exception,’ Schmitt contended, ‘the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.’29 The strong rule that Schmitt advocated could no longer be justified by the divine right of kings, so he turned instead to the people as a source of legitimacy. For Schmitt, ‘the political’ was the most intense and extreme antagonism between friend and enemy.30 An authoritarian state was justified by the need to preserve the political unity of the people and defend them against the enemy within and without.
The development of Northern Ireland seemed to support Schmitt’s ideas: the liberalism of the Government of Ireland Act had given way to a ‘Protestant state’.31 At the start of the Anglo-Irish truce, Brooke hoped that ‘within the next few days the healing process will begin whereby all Irishmen can unite for the good of their country’.32 By the early 1930s, at the very latest, he had concluded that the hostility that existed between the two communities could not be overcome. As Brooke explained to Parliament, ‘There is a catholic political party which … ranges from benevolent nationalism to the extreme of the extreme … but the one plank in their platform is the destruction of Ulster.’33 To defend the state against this ever-present danger, the Special Powers Act authorised the government to ‘take all steps and issue all such orders as may be necessary for preserving the peace and maintaining order’.34 But Northern Ireland fell short of Schmitt’s stipulation that the state should have a monopoly on the political. While the German jurist wanted interest groups excluded from the political sphere, Stormont – the seat of the Northern Ireland government from 1932 onwards – received an endless stream of delegations.35 Schmitt’s beliefs brought him into the service of the Nazis; the unionist people’s beliefs brought them into conflict with the Third Reich.36 Indeed, Brooke was prepared to accept reunification as the price for the South entering the Second World War. He instead had to make a much greater sacrifice to defend the empire: two of his sons were killed.37
POST-WAR APPEASEMENT
On the night of 15–16 April 1941, the Luftwaffe dropped incendiaries, bombs and landmines on Belfast. In Brian Moore’s novel The Emperor of Ice Cream, Freddy Hargreaves cheers on the destruction of the city: ‘Blow up … Stormont Castle and Lord Carson’s statue and the Houses of bloody Parliament.’38 These buildings survived the Belfast blitz, but the government of John Andrews was dealt a major blow. The smooth succession of the sixty-nine-year-old Andrews to the premiership after Sir James Craig’s death in November 1940 betrayed the Unionist leadership’s growing complacency. The German bombers had attacked the least prepared city in the United Kingdom and inflicted the highest casualty rate – over 900 people were killed – for any single night’s raid outside London. Belfast’s working-class districts were the worst hit, revealing the city’s hidden poverty and the need for urgent social reform.39 From 1941 onwards, increasing labour unrest provided a constant reminder of the government’s unpopularity and incompetence. A rebellion of junior ministers and Unionist backbenchers finally deposed Andrews in April 1943. Brooke, the only Unionist leader who was having a ‘good war’, was installed as the new Prime Minister.40
Although he harboured doubts about the expense of post-war reconstruction and had pushed for a stronger approach to industrial relations, Brooke recognised that Northern Ireland would have to change.41 The civil service was eager to start work on reform. Some officials had taken a part-time course in social studies at Queen’s University Belfast in 1941–2 and afterwards had kept together as a reading group. The circle’s sacred text was the Beveridge Report.42 Drawing upon the experience of three decades in social administration, Sir William Beveridge brought together and expanded existing welfare schemes into a comprehensive system of national insurance. He also recommended the creation of a national health service and an end to mass unemployment. Surveys found that nine out of every ten people in the United Kingdom backed Beveridge’s crusade to slay the giants of poverty, ignorance, want, squalor, idleness, and disease.43 A return to the failed laissez-faire order of the 1930s was out of the question; a better new world had to be built.
The Beveridge Report reasoned that: ‘A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions.’44 Brooke might appear to have been an odd revolutionary: he was fifty-seven years old when the 1945 Northern Ireland general election was held and had been involved in politics for over a quarter of a century. However, the welfare states of post-war Europe were all built by men from similar backgrounds. Clement Attlee, the British Prime Minister, and Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first Chancellor, were even older and more seasoned than Brooke. The exhausted populations of Western Europe desired social and economic reform, but they also wanted political stability. Brooke and his generation of statesmen provided a living link to the old Europe that had perished in 1914. After the ideological conflict between communism and fascism during the inter-war years, they offered the voters pragmatic, consensus politics. Like Germany’s Christian Democrats, Brooke piloted a middle course between the extremes of laissez-faire and socialism.45 Although there was substantial support within the party for low taxation and limited public spending, Brooke stood firm. ‘The backbone of Unionism is the Unionist Labour Party,’ he reminded a rally in 1947. ‘Are those men going to be satisfied if we reject the social services and other benefits we have had by going step by step with Britain?’46
Unionist opponents of the welfare state objected not only to the high rates of taxation demanded by the system, but also to the beneficiaries of the redistribution of resources. The welfare state was universal: Catholics as well as Protestants would receive benefits. ‘These people who are protected under our laws are turning around and biting the hand that feeds them,’ one MP indignantly remarked.47 Brooke reacted to this criticism. To allay fears that the welfare state would attract Southern migrants, eligibility for benefits was made dependent upon the fulfilment of a five-year residence requirement. Such tactical manoeuvring, however, did not head off the growing rebellion over the apparent concessions being made to the minority. The confrontation between the leadership and the dissidents came over the issue of education. The Brooke government was proposing to increase capital grants to Catholic schools, yet was refusing to ensure that local authorities were represented on their management committees.48 The internal discussions on the legislation involved a February 1951 meeting of the party at which the wider unease with ‘appeasement’ was voiced. Brooke recalled that he had recently been forced by the Orange Order to defend the new Northern Ireland Housing Trust (NIHT). This public body had the power to build and to manage housing estates – allocating tenancies without any regard to religion. The Prime Minister explained that he had ‘finished
