• Fighting Poverty
• A 35 hour week without loss of pay so that work is shared out.
• A minimum wage of £6 an hour or £210 a week.
• Scrap the JSA.
• Decent benefits, training and jobs for all.
• New Labour must not continue Tory privatisation policies.
  Health
• Opposition to all cuts -- New Labour must not carry on Tory policies.
  Restore the 3% across the board cut in funding.
  Education
• Opposition to all education cuts.
• For a free, quality comprehensive and integrated education system from nursery to University.
• Environment
• No to the NIGEN waste incinerator and Magheramourne dump.
• Major investment into a cheap, accessible, integrated publicly owned transport system that meets the needs of the environment.
• Inequality and Discrimination
• End discrimination against people whether on grounds of religion, sex, disability or race.

Sectarianism

• No going back to the last 25 years.
• We oppose all forms of sectarianism and stand for independent working class and community action to stop threats, attacks and killings.

Decommissioning

• The Socialist Party favours scrapping all weapons but believe the demand for decommissioning is a stalling tactic.
• Only a lasting settlement which tackles the roots of the conflict can ensure permanent peace.

Policing

• For a locally based community police service that is unarmed, account able, cross community and democratically controlled by locally elected bodies.

Prisoners

• To help strengthen the search for a solution the Socialist Party generally favours the release of those convicted for offences arising out of the Troubles.

National Question

• The Socialist Party will only support a settlement which has the agreement and support of both communities. None of the proposals advanced by the major parties can achieve this. Consent and agreement is only possible if working class communities come together and unite for a socialist solution..We stand for a socialist Ireland and a socialist federation of Britain and Ireland on a free, equal and voluntary basis. Within this the rights of all minorities would be guaranteed.

The Northern Ireland peace talks resume in the New Year -- with less prospect than ever of producing a real solution to the problem.

Three years ago, when the IRA and then the loyalists declared their ceasefires, there was a groundswell of opinion in both Protestant and Catholic areas for peace. This opening of the peace process came after a huge united movement of the working class against sectarian atrocities and demanding an end to the paramilitary campaigns.

The Northern Ireland peace talks resume in the New Year -- with less prospect than ever of producing a real solution to the problem.

Three years ago, when the IRA and then the loyalists declared their ceasefires, there was a groundswell of opinion in both Protestant and Catholic areas for peace. This opening of the peace process came after a huge united movement of the working class against sectarian atrocities and demanding an end to the paramilitary campaigns.

The 1994 ceasefire found the IRA on the backfoot, the military campaign having achieved only a stalemate and without any clear alternative strategy other than the building of a nationalist alliance, in Ireland and internationally, to ‘persuade’ the Protestants. The mood in Catholic and in Protestant areas was for compromise and reconciliation.

Even then, left in the hands of right wing and sectarian parties, the peace process would never have led to a stable and lasting settlement. But the momentum for peace allowed that there could be an interlude in the Troubles during which working class people would have had an opportunity to come together at workplace and community level and a class alternative to sectarian politics could have emerged.

The intransigence of the Tory government and of the major local parties meant that talks never got off the ground and the momentum for peace was lost.

The current talks take place against a very different background. The ongoing controversy over parades, especially what happened at Drumcree last year and this, has left Northern Ireland more bitterly and dangerously polarised than at any previous time. Whatever else this new ‘peace process’ is about it is certainly not about reconciliation.

Sinn Fein have taken their seats at the talks, not on the tail of an exhausted military campaign, but as part of an offensive movement and on the back of what they see as a victory won by Catholic ‘people power’ over the Orange Order on July 12. Expectations in Catholic areas have been raised that the talks will end all aspects of discrimination and repression and that the result will be a significant dent in the Union and a step towards a United Ireland.

The friends and allies being courted by Adams and McGuinness in the White House and among the political establishment in the South will pressurise Sinn Fein to accept less, but the pressure from within the Catholic community and from republican hardliners who have made their mark over the parades issue will be against anything they would see as a "sell out".

The Ulster Unionists are sitting down with Sinn Fein but with the opposite agenda of preserving the Union. While Paisley has set out to wreck the talks in order to preserve the status quo the Ulster Unionists understand that without change the status quo will not hold. Their aim is to offer concessions on equality in return for an internal settlement and a new local Assembly to which Sinn Fein would be expected to give their allegiance.

Protestant attitudes too have hardened and suspicions have risen that the talks now have a much more ‘republican agenda’. The Orange Order’s decision to cancel parades in disputed areas did not show a new spirit of accommodation, but an acceptance of territorial division and a drawing back by Protestants into their own community. With this mood on the one side and a more strident nationalism on the other he likelihood of the talks coming up with anything is slender.

They could falter on Unionist insistence on decommissioning. Or issues such as policing could bring a complete deadlock. Despite the hurdles to be surmounted it isn’t entirely ruled out that some overall package might eventually be agreed. Or it is possible that a part agreed part disputed package might be imposed by the two governments. What is ruled out is that either of these outcomes would be a solution or that any new structures which may be established would be permanent.

Behind the cover of the ‘peace process’ and the talks, the real process on the ground over the last year and more has been a process of division along sectarian lines. If sectarian organisations, republican and loyalist, maintain their current grip in working class communities this ‘repartition process’ will continue whatever happens at the talks.

The voices arguing for a return to the paramilitary campaigns are now quite isolated. However with groups like the INLA in existence, with the Continuity IRA threatening to bomb Britain ‘ into the third world’ and with the LVF operating as the unofficial paramilitary shadow of the DUP and picking up dissident UVF and UDA members. Even if all these groups remain small, the situation is more volatile and less predictable than ever.
What has happened is a serious setback to the working class movement and to working class people generally. And what may happen could be much worse. Throughout the Troubles there was never any possibility of a solution on the basis of the present economic system. Now, as the sectarian divide has deepened the basis for even a temporary accommodation has become narrowed.

Protestants will never accept a capitalist united Ireland. The Southern State has no attraction to them.Instead they fear that, as a minority, they would suffer discrimination and ill treatment - and the rise of the assertive nationalism of Sinn Fein has only confirmed their fears. Catholics, especially working class Catholics who face unrelieved poverty and unemployment, are now less prepared to accept the status quo.

A real solution means bridging the divide which separates Protestant and Catholic workers, not institutalising it through some form of power sharing. It means answering the fears of Catholics and Protestants of discrimination and of the trampling of rights and culture. It means offering economic security by providing decent jobs, decent services and facilities.

It is only the working class which can achieve this. Despite all that has happened the real common interests of working class people are far greater and stronger than the sectarian ties which separate them.

Unity already exists in the workplaces and in workplace union organisation. Some community organisations which are genuinely cross community have held together. It is by building on this unity at the bottom, not by relying on the politicians at the top, that the basis for a solution can be found.

A parallel peace process involving rank and file trade union bodies, community groups, women's groups, youth groups and other organisation with roots in working class communities is now needed. A ‘Peoples Forum’ involving such groups would be far more capable of coming up with a solution that the politicians with their sectarian vested interests at Stormont.

The national problem can be resolved but only if the starting point is social change -- not just changing the location of a border or colour of a flag. A movement whose goal is the ending of poverty, unemployment and exploitation could unite Catholic and Protestant workers in the North and could unite workers North, South and in Britain.

A socialist Ireland as a voluntary part of a socialist federation of Britain and Ireland is the one answer to the national conflict which could win the consent of both working class communities in the North and which would involve the coercion of neither community.The alternative is to continue along the present course towards repartition and a Bosnia style settlement.

Those arguing against this and for class unity have been temporarily isolated by the upsurge of sectarianism of recent years. However there are many individuals, Catholic and Protestant, who are repelled by what is taking place and who see the dangers.

By building a socialist alternative which can attract these people -- even if it is on a small scale for the time being -- the Socialist Party is laying the base for a future mass socialist organisation capable of challenging and defeating sectarianism.

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