Boyd Black

Black is a graduate of Trinity College, Oxford, with masters degrees from Columbia University.

Anglo-Irish Agreement

In 1986, Black stood in the Fulham by-election in protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

Mr Boyd Black, an economics lecturer at Queen's University, Belfast, has no formal links with the two Unionist parties, but his entry into the contest is designed to damage Tory prospects.

The decision to ask Mr Black, who has campaigned for the British Labour Party to organize in Northern Ireland, to stand was made after an independent anti-EEC 'Conservative' candidate withdrew.

Mr Black's decision to stand is not part of the overall 'loyalist' campaign to wreck the agreement, but is being backed by Mr John Taylor, Official Unionist MP for Strangford.

In contrast to the Times, The Guardian's account linked Black more closely to the overall unionist campaign:

Ulster Unionists are fielding a candidate in next month's byelection in Fulham, west London, as the opening shot in a campaign to embarrass the Government and secure a wider audience for their opposition to the Anglo-Irish agreement.

A lecturer from Queen's University, Belfast, Mr Boyd Black, is to stand in Fulham under the label 'Democratic Rights for Northern Ireland.'

Mr John Taylor, the Official Unionist MP for Strandford, and organiser of the campaign, said the aim was to highlight the denial to the people of Ulster of the same parliamentary rights enjoyed by the rest of the United Kingdom.

Blacks election agent confirmed that he had been a member of the British and Irish Communist Organisation at one time. At the time of the bye-election, Black was a member of the Fabian Society, which criticised his decision to stand.

Labour in Northern Ireland

In 1990, Black chaired a group which put up Erskine Holmes in the Upper Bann by-election, and threatened to take the British Labour Party to court over its refusal to accept Northern Ireland members:

As with the Ulster Conservatives, who face their first big electoral test at Upper Bann this week, a question mark hangs over whether the campaigners for Labour organisation in the province are secular activists or closet unionists. The chair of Friday's For The Right To Vote Labour press conference, Boyd Black, was among a few hundred mainly Paisleyite supporters who protested against the recent visit to Belfast by the republic's premier, Charles Haughey.

Black described himself as secretary of Labour in Northern Ireland in a 1995 letter which criticised Tony Blair for defending the party's refusal to accept Northern Ireland members.

Black was accused of using the issue as a unionist ploy by David Morrison of the Campaign for Labour Representation:

The care taken by the CLR to ensure that the advocacy of the principle that a party seeking a mandate to govern a state should submit candidates to the electorate in all regions of that state, did not degenerate into mere unionist lobbying made the CLR unacceptable to Dr Black and he resigned from it many years ago. In 1992 he was one of the enthusiastic supporters of Kate Hoey MP in establishing Democracy Now as a clearly unionist lobby using the Labour Party issue as a unionist device.

The character of Democracy Now was placed beyond doubt when Kate Hoey took an active part in Robert McCartney's ultra unionist election campaign in North Down, and other founder members of Democracy Now have acted as Robert McCartney's campaign manager and parliamentary research officer. And during the McCartney election campaign a Democracy Now MP, Michael Conarty, even took part in the founding meeting of a "Unionist Labour Group" as a subordinate organisation of the Unionist Party.

The unionist character of Democracy Now was strangely absent from Frank Millar's report of their fringe meeting at Brighton on October 2nd.

In response, Black said that Labour in Northern Ireland stressed the principle of unity by consent:

This was exactly the position on which I resigned from the CLR in 1992. My resignation letter (which is available on request) made it clear that I was resigning because of what I believed was undemocratic manipulation of the CLR by David Morrison as secretary, and not for any other reason.

Labour in Northern Ireland did not support any candidate in the North Down by-election. Nor, for that matter, did Democracy Now.