Geoff Bell Labour for Irish Unity on the Labour Left Podcast

The Fight For a United Ireland

Geoff Bell is an outstanding historian of the troubles; but more than that he has many decades of experience as an Irish activist in Britain fighting for a united Ireland. His most famous book, published in 1976, and reprinted five times is the Protestants of Ulster. More recently he has published Hesitant Comrades and The Twilight of Unionism. He is an organic intellectual in the truly Gramscian sense of the term.

The podcast will give socialists an excellent grounding in modern Irish history and along the way you’ll hear stories of minding Vanessa Redgrave, fighting in the Bogside alongside Bernadette Devlin, carrying Eamon McCann’s megaphone, Kinnock trying to torpedo Geoff’s Channel Four Documentary and being followed by police spies whilst driving Gerry Adams.

Geoff explained in Michael Farrell’s Twenty Years On, published in 1988, that during the events in Derry of the late sixties and early seventies he “gained a political education the like of which few contemporary European Socialists have had the privilege of receiving”. In this episode of the Labour Left Podcast, you find out why.

Towards the end of the podcast Geoff talks about what could be the final stages of the struggle for Irish Unity. Geoff ends by setting British socialists some important tasks to help make sure that both Geoff and myself get to see a United Ireland in our lifetimes.

If you’re new to the Labour Left Podcast, please take a look at our back catalogue. Previous episodes have included Rachel Shabi talking about her book The Truth About Antisemitism; Bernard Regan author of The Balfour Declaration: Empire, the Mandate and Resistance in Palestine; Prof Harvey J Kaye on the legacy of the Communist Historians; Prof Corinne Fowler, talking about her book Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain; Andrew Fisher telling the story behind For the Many Not the Few Labour’s 2017 manifesto; Jeremy Gilbert, a Prof of Cultural and Political Theory, a champion of Gramsci, talking about Thatcherism; Mike Phipps, author of Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, taking a long term look at the Labour Left; Mike Jackson, co-founder of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, on the Great 1984-85 Miners’ Strike; political activist Liz Davies telling her story as the dissenter within Blair’s New Labour; Rachel Garnham, a current co-Chair of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy looking back at the history of the fight for democracy in the British Labour Party; and finally myself telling the story of Brighton Labour Briefing, a local Bennite magazine of the 1980s.

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Bryn Griffiths is an activist in Colchester Labour Party and North Essex World Transformed. He is the Vice-Chair of Momentum and sits on the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’s Executive.

Bryn hosts Labour Hub’s spin off – the Labour Left Podcast. You can find all the episodes on YouTube or if you prefer audio platforms (for example Amazon, Audible Spotify, Apple etc,) go to your favourite podcast provider and just search for the Labour Left Podcast.

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