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Introduction: the British left and Ireland in the twentieth century

This special issue is dedicated to the history of the British left and Ireland, from the Edwardian era through to the ‘Troubles’. The British left has had an enduring, yet uneasy, relationship with their Irish counterparts, as well as the wider Irish republican movement and the ‘Irish Question’. As Sam Porter andDenis O’Hearnwrote in themid-1990s inNew Left Review, ‘British Left attitudes toward Ireland have long troubled Irish socialist republicans’. The special issue contains five articles that look at various aspects of this relationship across the twentieth century. It is an expansion of our edited volumes on the history of the British far left, published by Manchester University Press in 2014 and 2017, and a companion to our special issue of Socialist History Journal on British Marxist intellectuals since 1956. We are excited to bring together five articles that will help develop the scholarship and build our knowledge of the long history that exists between the British left and Ireland, which we briefly explore below. From the time of the Chartists onwards, there have been connections (but also disconnections) between the British and Irish labour movements, as well as the socialist lefts in both countries. Marx and Engels, according to Chandana Mathur and Dermot Dix, ‘took an active interest in the Fenian movement’ in the late 1860s and early 1870s, and at different points in time had seen a potential working class revolution in England as the catalyst for social upheaval in Ireland and vice versa. Forming the idea that Ireland was the ‘weak link’ in British imperialism (an idea that has been carried down through British left thought since), Marx and Engels dedicated significant time in the First International to the ‘Irish question’. Whilst the First International had branches in both Ireland and Britain during the height of the Fenian movement, it gained limited traction within the broader British labour movement, appealing more to the Irish diaspora that existed in Britain at the time. John Newsinger has argued that ‘Marx seriously underestimated the strength of reformism and nationalism within the British working class’. This led to the British working class and labour organisations being dominated by the English, and the ‘Celtic fringe’ being subordinated to their demands. As James D. Young and Paul Ward have shown, in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, the Marxian left (particularly, the Social Democratic Federation [SDF] and the British Socialist Party [BSP]) was infused with