The comrades seem to have somehow slipped into implying that the Irish republic of Bertie Ahern is some kind of workers' state, and that the protestants are in some way equivalent to various counterrevolutionary holdouts against putative social revolutions. The use of such analogies only reveals the comrades' confusion and lack of understanding of elementary differences between the class nature of states, as well as their utter incomprehension of the national question. The best way of winning unionist workers to our side is through a programme of revolutionary socialist transformation. Such a view would be pretty hallucinogenic, but it is in fact only the ultimate logic of another variation of imperialist economism. It sounds like the kind of argument you might hear from the Socialist Party.
Common methodologies make strange bedfellows, even when the programmatic impulses differ.
This passage falsely assumes that in the event of this option being realistically offered to the British-Irish by a revolutionary movement in Ireland, the whole status quo as it exists today would be unshaken in the rest of these islands. A ridiculous, sterile view of social struggle and dynamics. But behind this is a profoundly pessimistic view, which basically assumes that the protestant people are irremediably reactionary, and that, even in the face of a militant determination of the currently oppressed to ensure there is no reversal of the terms of oppression, the protestants will remain completely unshakeable in their monarchism and anti-catholic bigotry. If the workers of the oppressor nation defended the right of the oppressed nation to secede, it would build bridges with the workers of the oppressed nation. The new CPGB position would mean asking anti-imperialists and Irish republicans to become the champions of the loyalist right to have their own state.