The Northern Star, Vol. 7, No. 6

Many thanks to the person who forwarded this to the Archive.

This is an intriguing document issued from the formerly BICO stable – and includes advertising for the Bevin Society publication Labour & Trade Union Review. In a short eight pages it covers considerable ground including a piece on Kate Hoey, BLP MP, who had just been dismissed as a shadow cabinet spokesperson over the Maastricht Treaty. The Northern Star posits an interesting critique – in this instance over Hoey being ‘someone who has done everything to block Labour politics in Northern Ireland’ and quotes a Private Eye article.

This complaint aligns with the broader attitude found in the newsletter where there is strong support for the extension of the British Labour Party to Northern Ireland and considerable interest in and analysis of Council for Labour representation candidates at the then recent Local Government Elections.

Other pieces examine the Conservative and Unionist Party and Alliance. There’s an odd line in a review of a local history project publication on a series of murders by RIC/RUC members in 1922. Noting that ‘this incident still lives in the folk-memory of Catholic Belfast’ it concludes ‘it is hard to understand why this book was written, it myth have been a better idea to concentrate on the housing or industry in North Belfast (the Glenravel in the title refers to an area of the New Lodge not the County Antrim village. It’s an odd name of what must be an overwhelmingly Catholic group. Glenravel used to be the RUC headquarters, and the street led directly to the only British Army barracks in Belfast proper).

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