The eve of a major multilateral trade negotiation is a time to meditate. This is not because the atmosphere is beauteous, calm and free. Nor is it about to become so because major governments, after years of haggling, are ready — more or less — to enter the round. Indeed, the Conventions of trade negotiation are antithetical to a calm and clear understanding of what combination of aspiration and realism will do most to improve the conditions of international trade. In such negotiations, the general objective — the reduction of trade barriers — is referred to as a concession to others. ‘Standing firm’ and other forms of negativism are praised. Brinkmanship is encouraged— at least among those strong enough to do damage.

As Joan Robinson put it so well, marxism is the opium of the Marxists — and the opium often works its effect on the Marxist mind by means of convoluted conceptual loops, many of them associated with stubborn exercises in essentialist labelling: what is Marxism? Who are the true Marxists? Who are the (self-appointed) Marxists unworthy of such a tag in the eyes of the custodians of the doctrine?

The purpose of this article is to draw attention to a fact about the situation in Northern Ireland which has been almost universally overlooked or misunderstood where, that is, it has not been deliberately concealed, and to draw out its principal implications. This is that the people of Northern Ireland are excluded from the party political System which determines the government of the United Kingdom (the State of which Northern Ireland nominally forms part), that they have not chosen to exelude themselves but have been excluded by the actions of the major British political parties and that their continuing exclusion is today sustained by deliberate decision of the leaders of those parties.