The British government have appointed an ‘expert advisory panel’ to write a public history of the Troubles. This represents a crude propaganda exercise that parallels the same government’s subversion of inquests, like Sean Brown’s, by blanket redactions and lies about national security. Readers of this blog will not be surprised to see the names of Lord Paul Bew and Henry Patterson on the list of ten ‘experts.’ Yet all the commentary I have read thus far has failed to make the crucial point that if these historians are not actually agents of the British intelligence system, they are most certainly assets. Their job is to launder the record of imperial forces and their proxies under a smokescreen of liberal historiography. As Alexi Sayle said of their fellow travellers with Zionism during his alternative Christmas message: ‘Nothing has shown the hypocrisy of our political class and the gap between them and all decent people more than their silence in the face of mass murder.’
I made my way on to Twitter to assess their ‘expert’ opinion. Paul Bew and Professor Michael Kerr don’t do Twitter, but they seldom if ever criticise Israel. Like his close political associate, David Trimble, Bew has embraced the most extreme versions of Anglo-American neo-liberalism at home and of neo-conservative imperialism abroad. Bew chaired the hawkish Anglo-Israel Association, and, like Trimble, a founder of the Friends of Israel initiative, he trades on their dubious reputation as ‘peacemakers’ to promote ‘liberal’ interventionism in nations resistant to Anglo-American demands.[1]
As for his old friend and ‘comrade’, apart from recently praising the evidence deployed but not the analysis of one of my recent articles, Henry Patterson’s Twitter account went from full outrage at left-wing failure to properly condemn Hamas over October 7th to near total silence since. Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid who has been a dwarf moon orbiting Bew’s gas giant since I knew her during her PhD in 2005 has said nothing publicly. Edward Burke, who had counter insurgency guru, Richard English, as his PhD supervisor is a hawk who seldom fails to promote ending Irish neutrality. Burke consistently produces anti-Russian and anti-Iranian tweets but has little to say about Israeli genocide except for occasionally criticising Netanyahu. His politics is firmly of the pro-Brit, pro-Unionist, Blue Shirt variety. Professor Richard Bourke marked his own card with an atrocious recent article for the right-wing unHerd magazine on ‘the Left’ and identity politics. Helen Parr wrote a bromance about the paratroopers and Ian McBride is a Unionist apologist for Peter Hart’s dubious methodology on Cork. In short, these people are not independent experts, they’re imperial lackeys and West Brit fellow travellers – the kept creatures of Empire.
None of them would seriously question that other great imperialist propagandist and apologist, Niall Ferguson’s, notorious white washing that “the British Empire acted as an agency for imposing free markets, the rule of law, investor protection and relatively incorrupt government on roughly a quarter of the world.” Free markets have blighted the world under the American imperium, their rule of law is a disgusting lie, investors are protected while children starve and burn to death and their governments are in the pocket of plutocrats.
This type of ‘history’ has a very long history of its own, since, in the nineteenth century, when the Empire engaged in 250 separate armed conflicts (or at least one per year). The British Empire and its American successor are built on massive violence and brute force. As Caroline Elkins rightly argues the notion of good government in empire represented ‘liberalism’s fever dream. Its rule of law codified difference, curtailed freedoms, expropriated land and property, and ensured a steady stream of labour for the mines and plantations that fed Britain’s domestic economy.[2] Since the Second World War, ‘the number of victims of US-backed violence in Latin America “vastly exceeded” the number of people killed in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc over the same period of time.’[3] US intervention has resulted in millions of deaths in Asia and has turned the Middle East into an open wound. The ‘expert panels’ in Ireland and similar bodies across empire work to provide a liberal and progressive veneer to imperial murder. Again as Elkins remarks ‘violence was inherent to liberalism. It resided in liberalism’s reformism, its claims to modernity, its promises of freedom, and its notion of the law—exactly the opposite places where one normally associates violence.’[4]
Elkins paid specific attention to the ‘liberal’ historian, John Robert Seeley, the founder of British imperial history, who claimed in 1883, the year after Gladstone’s Liberal government crushed secular Arab nationalism in Egypt that ‘We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.’ The British would not leave Egypt until 1950, before reinvading with their Zionist allies in 1956. Seeley drew on the empiricism of Leopold von Ranke. Ranke claimed that the historian’s objectivity and reliance on documentary evidence would produce factual truth. It is unsurprising then, that Marx described Ranke as a ‘weed’ and ‘capering little troll’ who wrote ‘root-grubbing’ history which attributed great events to ‘mean and petty’ causes. [5] Ranke’s acolytes likewise represented the ‘valets’ carrying the historical baggage of the elite,[6] in what Walter Benjamin described as ‘a triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate’.[7] The high proponents of empiricism have been resolutely conservative in their politics: Ranke was made a nobleman in 1865 and appointed to the Prussian Privy Council in 1882; his inheritors in the academy promote a narrative which favours the current incumbents of political power in Ireland and Britain. Clearly ‘the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.’[8] As Elkins outlines
Seeley took up Ranke’s method, though neither he nor his successors questioned the sanctity of the state archive at the Public Record Office; nor did they challenge Britain’s self-representations as liberal imperialists, or the alleged civilizing superiority of the nation’s past and its people. Seeley and the emerging historical profession played an important role in how the nation and the world understood Britain’s imperial project.[9]
Elkins, Legacy of violence
Seeley promoted a linear story of liberty and progress harnessed to imperial expansion. He ridiculed Irish and Indian nationalism, arguing you couldn’t conquer a country that didn’t exist in the first place! But ultimately, imperialism operated on a supremacist basis or ‘the general fact that the ruling race in British India has a higher and more vigorous civilisation than the native races.’ Like Ranke, Donald Kelley argues that Seeley assumed that “the way things really were was the way that men of power and influence judged them to be; and to this extent he was a prisoner of his sources as well as of language and religious and philosophical heritage.’ Ranke’s spurious professional neutrality served as a justificatory pretext for British imperial historians in the decades to come. ‘Cloaked in neutrality, Whig narratives would combine acts of omission and sleights of hand to create histories that became hagiographies of Britain’s civilizing mission.’ Throughout the twentieth century, these historians shaped Britain’s ‘future leaders at Oxford and Cambridge.’[10]
This is the historical context to this ‘expert’ panel spearheaded by Professor Baron Paul Bew of Donegore. I have dealt with the work of Bew and Patterson in previous blogs, but some of the main points merit repetition here given this recent development. At the first meeting of the Northern Ireland Centenary Forum, the chairman, Bew, stressed that it is ‘important that the centenary is marked in such a way that recognises the historical facts of the period’.[11] Bew’s propagandist quango however ignored the social and political ‘facts’ on the ground in contemporary Belfast a century ago, where sectarian violence and state-sponsored terror accompanied, indeed enabled, the founding of the new regime. In his recent Tweet on my article, Henry Patterson, whom I directly challenge in the article’s conclusion, graciously admitted ‘don’t agree with analysis but it has important new material on Carson, Craig & Bates and UULA’.
What my new material establishes is a direct conspiracy between the Unionist elite, dominated by Carson and the violently sectarian Minister of Home Affairs, Richard Dawson Bates, and the proto-fascist UULA founded by Carson under the influence of the racist imperialist Alfred Lord Milner in the latter stages of the First World War. The North received a baptism in blood on the streets of Belfast in the summer of 1920, when loyalist mobs expelled ten thousand Catholics and ‘rotten Prods’ (Protestant socialists) from the city’s largest workplaces. The Ulster Unionist leaders facilitated this purge, and the British imperial state provided sanction when it recruited the pogromists into the Ulster Special Constabulary [USC]. Over the next two years, more than 23,000 people were driven from their homes and nearly five hundred killed – over ninety per cent of them civilians and a significant majority Catholics, in a city where that denomination comprised hardly a quarter of the population. The late Eamon Phoenix estimated that fifty thousand fled the six-counties in the period, or approximately one in ten of the nationalist population.[12] These ‘facts’ speak to a level of violence and disruption unmatched anywhere in Ireland, but familiar to any student of extreme right-wing violence in contemporary Europe.
In terms of their apparent expertise, Henry Patterson and Paul Bew’s careers speak to the fact that if both were not active British agents, they were certainly assets for empire. Bew and Patterson emerged as a distinct bastardised Marxist version of wider Irish historical revisionism, which was explicitly counter-revolutionary, even counter-reformist. They have spent their life justifying not only Britain’s past and current Irish policies but propping up the Anglo-American ruling class’s neoliberal and neoconservative projects, both domestically and globally. Indeed, Bew and his son, also a ‘liberal’ historian, are mouth pieces for a dominant neo-conservative Tory party, itself embedded in an Anglo-American network pledged to military intervention and imposing market discipline globally. They will happily switch allegiance to Keir Starmer’s Atlanticist labour party, itself populated with career politicians whom the US State Department filtered through the British-American partnership and other ‘expert groups.’ Ralph Miliband once famously observed that, ‘in most countries, politics is dominated by an insular elite that permits entry to few outsiders.’ Ironically, Miliband’s two sons represented two permitted entry as does the despicable Hilary Benn.[13]
Both Bew and Patterson’s careers are illustrative, even paradigmatic, of this very process. Both evolved from youthful flirtations with ‘Orange Marxism’ to intellectual service for Ulster unionism, as official advisers to the Unionist Party. Compelled to rethink their youthful radicalism when the civil rights movement reached a crossroads at Burntollet, Bew et al found in Louis Althusser’s ‘post-structuralism’ a framework from which to refute an anti-imperialist reading of Irish history. Throughout the conflict that erupted in 1969, they insisted that national independence and unification had ‘no relevance to the future of Ireland’. As Anthony Coughlan rightly notes, this was ‘no novel thesis’ but ‘the view of unionists, of the Orange Order, of transnational capital and of Her Majesty’s Government[.] The originality of the authors and of [their] imitators is that no one previously had the thought of presenting it as Marxism’.[14] À la française, these Orange Marxists disregarded praxis and effectively rejected history as process, preferring to transform theory into practice, where ideas represented the raw materials that produce objective knowledge. The raft of Althusserian studies constructed ideological models of unionism detached from the reality of events; in short, they amounted to what E. P. Thompson characterized as ‘unhistorical shit’.[15]
Like a snake with its skin, Bew shed Marxism for the Peterhouse school of high politics. At Cambridge, Bew joined his son, John, in helping to found the neo-conservative Henry Jackson Society (HJS). In essence, the going concern of Bew & Son have pedalled their supposed expertise on Irish terrorism to a range of neo-conservative hawks. The elder Bew also sat on two dubiously-funded ‘All Party Parliamentary Groups’ (APPG), one for Homeland and another for Transatlantic and International Security. Bew the Younger has risen further yet. John acted as director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, a collaboration of four academic institutions including the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC) a private college funded by Israeli securocrats.[16] In addition, he also headed the ‘Britain in the World Project’ for Policy Exchange, which The Daily Telegraph described as the UK’s ‘largest, but also the most influential think tank on the right’.[17]
It is little wonder then, that the HJS’s ‘Statement of Principles’, which promote Western military power and give ‘two cheers for capitalism’ attracted former MI6 head, Richard Dearlove, while former CIA director, James Woolsey, acted as an international patron. The HSJ’s Ulster connection can also be traced to David Trimble, Brendan Simms (the society’s leading light) as well as Colonel Tim Collins whose bombast in Iraq created a temporary frenzy of media sycophancy during an illegal war based on similar propagandist duplicity. Collins is currently doing a comic turn as Unionist candidate for North Down, while Policy Exchange are proposing that Britian house some of its nuclear arsenal in the North. Another northern Peterhouse historian and HJS founder, Matthew Jamison, served as chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association in 2004. It would be fair to state that, while not a solely northern affair, the HJS has a decidedly orange flavour.
The choice of the society’s name, in memory of Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, speaks to the camouflaging of its objectives. A liberal interventionist and Nixon’s favourite Democrat, Jackson’s staffers, from Paul Wolfowitz to Richard Perle, served the Reagan administration and played a leading role in George W Bush’s War on Terror. The HJS promoted a faux non-partisan platform, but their unequivocal advocacy of military intervention and crude championing of the free market and ‘liberal‘ democracy masked the reality of western intervention from the Cold War to the War on Terror.
John Bew shared initial HJS vice-chairmanship with Michael Gove who, as a leading member of the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), called the Zionist state the ‘light to the world’ and, as a Times journalist, compared the ‘moral stain’ of the Good Friday Agreement to appeasing Hitler.[18] We might also note that the bullying former Home Secretary, Priti Patel (a former CFI vice-chair), whom Theresa May sacked as international development secretary in 2017 for unofficial lobbying in Israel, has close links to the HSJ, as does Johnson’s Foreign Secretary, Dominic Rabb. In short, holders of two of Britain’s chief offices of state and the deputy PM have close associations with a neo-conservative think tank masquerading as a charity whose foundation owes a heavy debt to Ulster unionist academics. Historians who, despite their protestations of objectivity and non-partisanship, promote a resolutely neo-conservative, Islamophobic agenda that hides behind a smoke screen of the rule of law, liberal democracy, civil rights and the market economy.
Bew stands firmly in the intellectual tradition of Maurice Cowling, the guru of high politics, who helped school many of the right-wingers who executed the great reversal of the post-war welfarist consensus. Amongst his many acolytes in Tory central office, Cowling mentored a young Michael Gove and before that the future darling of the Thatcherite Right, Michael Portillo.
We can safely predict what this group of liberal experts will produce. John Bew and his HJS colleague, Martyn Frampton, sparked controversy in 2011, when historian Paul Dixon criticised their book Talking to Terrorists for attempting to reconcile Unionist support for the Good Friday Agreement with hard-line neoconservatism. Dixon inferred from his reading that you only talk when ‘the “terrorists” have been defeated. In short, the ‘“dirty war” had defeated the Provisional IRA by the early nineties, and this explains why the British were able to impose an uncompromising peace process.’[19] Bew and Frampton responded by denying that they actually wrote that the IRA lost the war, before arguing that to ‘acknowledge that the British state fought an “intelligence/dirty war” … is neither to endorse it nor to advocate the adoption of such tactics elsewhere; it is simply to recognise that it occurred and had an impact.’ Nevertheless, in 2008, John Bew compiled a report entitled ‘Talking to Terrorists: The Myths, Misconceptions and Misapplication of the Northern Ireland Peace Process’, which explicitly assessed its relevance to the Middle East; he unsurprisingly came down firmly on the side of Israeli hawks.[20] The historical lesson from such objective historians is clear: might is right. Muster whatever ’facts’ necessary to suit the exigencies of power in Ireland, Palestine or anywhere imperial interests appear threatened for, as Fanon noted in Algeria, ‘objectivity is always directed against’ the native.[21]
This expert group will produce a history which launders Britain’s dirty war, by exposing some of the collusion and deliberate murder as par for the course in a legitimate counter insurgency but avoiding the great structural question of the basis of Britian’s involvement in Ireland or as James Connolly said before they strapped him to a chair and shot him: ‘the British Government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland.’ We should expect little else from academics who, if they are not direct agents, are imperial assets or, as my mother often says, what would you expect from an asshole only shite? The ongoing genocide in Gaza and their studied silence or tacit support for it illustrates that these academics, be they assets or agents, are indeed little more than imperialist assholes. When their eventual ‘history’ emerges, as Alexi Sayle said of the Zionist apologists in his Christmas speech: ‘Then they will be lying, because that’s what they do, they lie and they lie and they lie and they lie and they lie and they lie and they lie and they lie and they lie and they lie etc.’
[1] Griffin, T, Aked, H, Miller, D & Marusek, S 2015, The Henry Jackson Society and the degeneration of British neoconservatism: Liberal interventionism, Islamophobia and the ‘War on Terror’. Public Interest Investigations, Glasgow, hereafter Griffin et al.
[2] Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence (London, 2022), pp 13-14.
[3] Quoted in Grace Blakely, Vulture Capitalism (London, 2024), p. 212.
[4] Elkins, Legacy, p. 16.
[5] Paul Blackledge, Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History (Manchester, 2012),pp 23-4.
[6] E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (London, 1978), p. 249.
[7] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York, 1968), p. 258.
[8] Karl Marx, German Ideology (Penguin, 2004), p. 64.
[9] Elkins, Legacy, p. 75.
[10] Elkins, Legacy, pp 75-6.
[11] Irish News, 10 Oct. 2020
[12] Eamon Phoenix, Northern nationalism: nationalist politics and the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, 1890-19140 (1994), p. 251
[13] Blakely, Vulture, p. 283.
[14] A. Coughlan, ‘Irish Marxist Historians’, in C. Brady (ed), Interpreting Irish History, (2006), pp 301-3.
[15] E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (1978), p. 108.
[16] Griffin, et al; for John Bew’s current position, see The London Times, 7 Nov. 2020.
[17] Daily Telegraph, 2 Oct. 2007.
[18] Griffin et al.
[19] Paul Dixon (2011) Guns First, Talks Later: Neoconservatives and the Northern Ireland Peace Process, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39:4, pp 649-676,
[20] Griffin et al.
[21] Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 61.
BLOSC 
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