Billy Hull - Loyalist Activism

Loyalist Activism

Hull was also active in loyalism and around 1970 he helped to establish the Workers' Committee for the Defence of the Constitution (WCDC), a loyalist trade union of which he was joint leader along with Hugh Petrie of Short Brothers. In February 1971, he led a march of 9,000 shipyard workers to demand the introduction of internment in the aftermath of the Corporals killings. Hull's march was one of the major factors in the resignation of James Chichester-Clark as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland.

In 1971 he founded the Loyalist Association of Workers (LAW), which campaigned against the abolition of the Parliament of Northern Ireland and which replaced the earlier WCDC. He felt that the LAW could harness the "Power of the grass roots", which he felt had been taken for granted by unionist politicians up to that point. The group, which combined an interest in working class issues with an anti-Catholic agenda and support for inequality, has been characterised by David McKittrick as presenting a syncretic form of "sectarian socialism". The group claimed as many as 100,000 members at its peak and Hull helped to organise a 48 hour strike as a response to the introduction of direct rule. This however was to prove the zenith of the LAW for Hull disagreed with other leading figures over strategy soon afterwards and the movement collapsed, with the bulk of the membership decamping to the Ulster Workers' Council.