The case against: Support for Labour candidates would be marginal, writes Kevin McNamara
I believe the proposal to permit membership recruitment for British Labour in Northern Ireland is recklessly short-sighted and runs counter to our commitment to defend and strengthen the Good Friday Agreement.
Setting the party in unwilling competition with our partners in the SDLP would be only the most immediate consequence of this rule change. The real threat is of triggering a legal and political chain reaction driven by those with an agenda to drag the party of government into the delicate balance of Northern Ireland politics on the side of hardline integrationists.
Well-meaning Labour Party members may be frustrated with the lack of progress and the despair of sectarian division in Northern Ireland, but they should remember that the Good Friday Agreement was negotiated, endorsed and sustained by Northern Ireland parties.
Electoral support for candidates put up by the British Labour Party would be marginal.
The membership campaign is sustained only by a fanatical core traceable to the 1970s when conservative UK integrationists and ultra-Stalinists found common cause in promoting British citizenship.
The Conservative Party's decision to establish associations in Northern Ireland is regarded as disastrous by all outside a narrow band of anti-agreement die-hards.
While the principle of party organisation as a symbol of the territorial integrity of the UK has been a persistent theme of David Trimble's speeches, the campaign torch has effectively been eclipsed by the Good Friday Agreement.
Democracy Now! leader Kate Hoey MP moved on to canvas for Robert McCartney's fringe UK Unionist Party and with the advent of new Labour, most of her supporters opted to relaunch a distinct Northern Ireland Labour organisation. Only a dogged rearguard remained to insist that Tony Blair should set up shop in the North.
In politics, however regrettably, tails have a habit of wagging dogs. This week Labour Party members will be told they must approve rule changes extending party membership to Northern Ireland because the party could not withstand the financial costs of legal actions being taken by prospective recruits.
Andy McGivern, a member of the GMB trade union, claims that since Labour denies his "right" to become an individual member of the party, he is a victim of racial discrimination.
Despite failure to win the support of the Commission for Racial Equality, he has pursued this claim as a private action due to be heard at London County Court in November. On the basis of unseen and undisclosed legal advice, the Labour executive is proposing to reach an out-of-court settlement by conceding that party membership be extended throughout the UK.
McGivern's claim is, I believe, a perverse use of race relations legislation. Individuals have no moral or legal "right" to force their own membership of a political party. It is entirely within the freedom of a political association to determine its own goals and objectives and to determine the territorial boundaries of its membership without outside interference.
McGivern cannot claim convincingly to be a member of a "distinct racial group" as required under the act. Labour organises members in Britain but not in Northern Ireland. That is not discrimination. Those who live in Northern Ireland live in a deeply divided society and everyone has a role to play in overcoming that legacy. That is the objective that Labour seeks to address through its policies in support of the Belfast Agreement and maintenance of its rules on organisation.
We do not accept the curiously dated rhetoric that Fermanagh is as British as Finchley. It may be a factual anomaly that you can be a Labour member in Baghdad but not Belfast, but Northern Ireland lives with anomalies.
We hope there will soon be fresh elections to the Assembly. A change of Labour policy to begin recruiting members in Northern Ireland cannot but be viewed with grave suspicion by the people with whom we should be working most closely.
Kevin McNamara is MP for Hull North and is a former Labour spokesman on Northern Ireland.