On the eve of one of the largest anti-racism demonstrations in Belfast’s history – which People Before Profit were central to building alongside many others – Irish News columnist Brian Feeney decided to launch a gratuitous political attack that compared us to the far-right.
As a political commentator, he follows the same tactic as Jamie Bryson, who also sought to create a false equivalence between the far-left and the far-right in the past week. Even as the far-right engage in the most obscene racist violence, the pair have no problem doubling down on their nonsense.
But Bryson and Feeney have more than one thing in common; they are both former electoral candidates content to latch onto establishment unionist and nationalist parties when it suits them, while hurling criticisms at all other corners from the sidelines. Last week, they used their platforms – on social media and in The Irish News respectively – to caricature and denigrate People Before Profit.
Feeney’s attack on People Before Profit comes straight out of the right-wing playbook, including caricatures of “Trots” based on well-worn Cold War-era tripe.
People Before Profit is not interested in rehashing historical arguments that have long been debunked. But for Feeney’s benefit; People Before Profit is an unashamedly left-wing organisation, which stands in the international socialist tradition of James Connolly.
When Feeney put pen to paper last week, our activists were working alongside many others to build a mass anti-racism mobilisation capable of confronting the far-right. Together we managed to put 15,000 people on the streets of Belfast to oppose the recent racist violence.
To draw comparisons between left and right in this context is not only disingenuous, but shameful and dangerous. No doubt, Feeney and the likes of Jamie Bryson operate from different motivations. Bryson gives cover to those who spread anti-immigrant bile, Feeney lends his pen to stifle any challenge to a political establishment which – whether he believes it or not – is incapable of challenging racism.
Such equivocation is rooted in a shared conservatism. In Bryson’s case, it’s a conservatism that wants to drag us back to a time of unionist domination and division. Former SDLP man Feeney, who has increasingly hitched himself to Sinn Féin’s wagon, espouses a conservatism that is largely interested in maintaining the existing social and economic order, albeit in a united Ireland.
People Before Profit have our eyes set on more fundamental change. We look forward to a future where the obscene wealth inequality of the present is consigned to the past. Where working-class people are united against the racism of the far-right and loyalist paramilitaries, and united against the sectarianism of a self-serving northern political establishment.
We will continue to build movements capable of uniting and reshaping our island in the interests of the majority, regardless of their background.
Tomorrow can indeed belong to the workers and to the oppressed. Those who say otherwise are consigning us to the stale politics of the past.