From the mayday Rooms archive: Troops out now!
Article: Medb McDaid
Aly Renwick, a former British soldier-turned-activist who was a founding member of the Troops Out Movement, wrote in 2017 that, “The Troops Out Movement’s full history has yet to be written.” Yet, as so much of its history is still unknown, this article considers a brief overview of the Troops Out Movement using documents in the MayDay Rooms Archive.
Set up in the autumn of 1973, the Troops Out Movement (TOM) was a political group formed in London to campaign against the British State’s war in Ireland during the euphemistically named ‘Troubles.’ The Troubles is the term designated to the thirty year period between 1968 and 1998 that saw over 3,600 people killed in a war that mainly took place in the six north-eastern counties of Ireland. TOM branches were quickly established across England in places such as Manchester, Newcastle, and Birmingham, as well as in Wales and Scotland. TOM, being partly comprised of former soldiers, also had some legitimacy in being able to target and picket Army Recruitment Offices in working-class areas to prevent more people from signing up to the war. They organised talks, film screenings, rallies, and protests in direct response to recurring atrocities, and focused on campaigning and the publication of political literature to counter the media narratives. Their publication, ‘Troops Out’, ran for over two decades, delivering political analysis, counter-propaganda to the state, and incredible artwork to activists in Britain.
The two primary goals of TOM included the ‘withdrawal of British Troops from Ireland’ and ‘self-determination for the Irish people as a whole’. The latter point refers to the partition of Ireland, which began in 1922 and saw a withdrawal of British occupation in twenty-six counties of Ireland, with the six northernmost counties remaining under British occupation. For over two and a half decades, the movement organised to campaign against the policies and actions of their government, which was found to be colluding or actively participating in the systematic targeting, criminalising, wounding, and killing of Irish people. TOM produced special issue publications on Rubber Bullets, the Hunger Strikes and Irish prisoners in British prisons.
It was considered particularly brave for TOM activists to challenge the British state and mainstream media at that time due to the widespread hostility towards Ireland and Irish people that was endemic in England. The ‘Prevention of Terrorism Act (Temporary Provisions) 1974’, a law introduced by the British government after the Birmingham Bombing, indiscriminately targeted Irish people regardless of their political allegiance, as well as British people who showed sympathy with the Irish struggle. Of the 7,000 who were detained under the Act, 6,000 were released without charge, having been subjected to a combined total of 200 years detention. Members of TOM were often held for up to seven days without trial and were subject to phone tapping, regular police interference in daily activities, and harassment at home and through employment. Yet, over time, and even in the face of the bombing campaign in Britain itself, TOM built considerable opposition to the British presence in Ireland. TOM was also able to use the crackdown on civil liberties on British soil as a way to engage the wider British left to challenge authoritarianism in their own state. Paddy Hill, one of the Birmingham Six who passed away in late 2024, said of the parallels, ‘They set out to isolate the Irish community in England, just as they are doing with Muslims today.’
Increasingly, we see the British State use such tactics, including curtailing freedom of speech and movement when it comes to highlighting British complicity in the genocide being committed by the Israeli state. Across the country, activists are being disproportionately punished for taking direct action against arms companies who are profiting from the destruction in Palestine, or even simply voicing dissent at the state’s role in this. Rather than curtailing the movement from action, it exposes the lengths that the British Government will go to in order to protect its military interests (and profit) in the conflict, and such tactics embolden new activists to get involved. While the movement supporting Palestine and an end to British complicity in the genocide of Palestinians continues to grow despite fierce repression, the Troops Out Movement began to dissipate by the late 1990s.
The signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 saw a halt on demands for ‘self-determination for the Irish people as a whole’ in favour of the promise of a power-sharing executive that would be established in the region—the dividends of which never materialised. Moreover, by the 1990s, British troops had long since stopped their overt targeting of Irish Catholics and the conflict had, for over a decade, been played out in a proxy war through Loyalists, diminishing Britain’s direct role. There was substantial evidence found by the Council of Europe (2022) of instances and patterns that the British state actively supported, armed, and encouraged loyalist paramilitary groups and the police to fight their war. The collusion between the British state, including the army and intelligence agencies, as well as the police force in Northern Ireland, was systematic. However, as the peace process had been framed in terms of an ethnonationalist peace treaty, rather than an anti-imperialist struggle, thereby whitewashing the British state of its role, it meant that appetite for an anti-imperialist solution was low. As such, TOM, as a mainly English-demographic based campaigning group, felt their aims had outgrown the course of the conflict and ceased activities, as the campaign objectives no longer reflected the mood of the population in Ireland, nor in Britain.
Recently, TOM founders have been speaking at 50 year anniversary events concerning lessons for the British left on solidarity and anti-imperialism. They consider their intervention as a useful blueprint for contemporary anti-war activists and their need to counter the current rise of militarisation and authoritarianism today. But, the British Government continues to exercise its colonial power in Ireland - in 2023 it legislated that no prosecutions against any soldiers or state personnel involved in the conflict will be taken forward, in a clear breach of the rights of mainly (though not exclusively) Irish Catholics affected by British State violence. So while anti-imperialist struggles may go through periods of quiet, for the TOM activists, their project will not be finished while the British state continues to operate with impunity, and until Irish people have self-determination as a whole.
By Medb McDaid, researcher and activist. MayDay Rooms Archive is running a regular feature in DOPE magazine to showcase their collection and emphasise the importance of learning from history for today’s political struggles! MayDay Rooms is an archive in central London which houses historical material linked to social struggles, resistance campaigns, experimental culture, and the expression of marginalised and oppressed groups.
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