Saturday is all about ypu

History tells us hard left politics brings only misery. Go beyond the surface and SF are hard left

IN THE wake of the October 1917 Bolshevik coup, the ousted foreign minister Pavel Miliukov said that the view among Russian ‘moderates’ was that the Leninists’ seizure of power was a good thing. The belief was that the Bolsheviks ‘would endure only the shortest time’. Besides, the Bolshevik ‘experiment’ would, Miliukov and his friends believed, be ‘highly desirable’ for it would ‘cure Russia of Bolshevism forever’.

The hope was that this disorganised rabble led by sociopathic Vladimir Lenin would, through the utter chaos of its rule, prove to the Russian people that Marxism was a great folly.

The ‘experiment’, of course, lasted 74 years and saw an unworkable political creed forced on Russia by repression and brutality.

I have heard a similar argument proposed many times about Sinn Féin since the 2020 general election. Many establishment figures have put it to me that the country needs to experience the voodoo economics and chaotic populism of Sinn Féin in power for a few years for its own good. ‘Let them wreck the country, that’ll teach them,’ goes the narrative. It is a variation on the bitter reaction of the Democratic candidate Dick Tuck to his failed bid for election to the California state senate in 1966: ‘The people have spoken, the b ****** s.’

RUSSIA turned to the Bolsheviks for many reasons: war, poverty and the failure of the corrupt Czarist regime and then the useless Provisional Government to confront the reality of the Russian’s plight. The Irish people are turning to Sinn Féin for logical and legitimate reasons. As Pearse Doherty tells me in an interview in this newspaper, the housing and financial crises did not just happen by chance, they happened because of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil’s policies.

There are many numbers that point to the electoral shift between 2016 and 2020, but the starkest are the total votes of the three largest parties in the last two elections. In 2016, over a million people voted for Fianna Fáil (519,356) and Fine Gael (544,140). Just 295,000 voted for Gerry Adams’ Sinn Féin.

In 2020, however, with a new leader, Sinn Féin won 535,595 votes, Fianna Fáil 484,320 and Fine Gael 455,584.

These are the figures that matter. Sinn Féin is a democratic party, and the majority of voters voted for it two years ago. We now face an electoral showdown between, on one side two centrist parties on the right of liberal consensus politics, and on the other a hard left party.

Fine Gael has clearly established itself as a low-tax party that seeks to attract affluent sections of society. It does not disguise this.

Fianna Fáil is making the traumatic metamorphosis from a national mass movement to a niche party. Unfortunately for Fianna Fáil, it has no clue what niche it wants to occupy.

Sinn Féin is a hard left party with a high tax/high spend philosophy. Its recent pre-Budget proposals aren’t overtly Communist but there is a process to be played out yet. On Friday, Sinn Féin said if it was their Budget, they would give a month’s rent back to every renter. The party, if

it was in government now, would spend €3bn to €4bn extra on the cost-of-living package.

Fantasy pre-Budget promises by an opposition party are relatively unimportant. In 2016, Fine Gael promised to abolish USC, and it was in government at the time. Fine Gael is still in government and hasn’t rid us of USC.

But look a little harder and you will see that Sinn Féin, like Fianna Fáil, is also undergoing a metamorphosis.

When I put it to Mr Doherty that his party was hard left, he said it was left. When put to him it was populist, he said it was popular. However, he conceded that a plan for a 3% solidarity tax on people earning more than €140,000 will be imposed on sole traders and the self-employed, the drivers of an economy. This kind of commitment is important, and it will frighten those of an entrepreneurial spirit.

Mr Doherty is Sinn Féin’s numbers man and clearly highly intelligent. But he is not given to writing at length or talking about his party’s philosophy.

His frontbench colleague Eoin Ó Broin is an author and scholar educated at Blackrock College and Queen’s University. He writes and speaks about ideology a lot.

In his book, Sinn Féin And The Politics Of Left Republicanism, he tells us: ‘The politics of contemporary Sinn Féin, and particularly the Gerry Adams generation of leaders, are in a large part a return to the writings of [Liam] Mellows mediated through the writings of Peadar O’Donnell and British Communist Desmond Greaves.’

Mellows was shot by the proTreaty Government in 1922, not before he wrote The Liam Mellows Jail Programme. Among the 10 points he advocated were the ownership and control of all heavy industries by the State for the benefit of all the people, State ownership of banks, the compulsory rationing of all available household accommodation, and the abolition of all rents.

THIS, of course, is Communism. Though Mr Ó Broin’s book was written in 2009 and Gerry Adams has stepped down as leader, Sinn Féin has never resiled from this position. It is not the kind of party where members promote this type of creed independently. For the hard left, dogma is important, as it imposes a warped logic on the fundamentally illogical.

Indeed, in 2021, Mr Ó Broin said in an interview that Sinn Féin in power would seek ‘to expand the role of the State to universalise the provision of key public services’ in a way that would ‘dramatically reduce not only inequalities but the unequal distribution of power and resources across all sections of society’.

He also said Sinn Féin sees its peers in modern politics as leftwing parties such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, the leftist movement behind Bernie Sanders in the US, and even the failed British socialist experiment led by Jeremy Corbyn.

We can of course make predictions as to what Sinn Féin will do in office, but the proof will only come, as with the Bolsheviks, when they take power.

What history tells us is that Communism has never worked. Hard left politics brings only misery. We can accurately predict that will happen again.