Where do unionists go from here? To focus on the political tribe currently fronted up by the DUP is not to suggest they are alone in wondering how to proceed. (If anyone in the DUP is doing more than sounding off.)
Looking closely at the SDLP at the moment would just be mean. Alliance? Nominally in good heart because the centre ground is supposedly growing, but as power-sharing disappears in the rear mirror how to be cross-community standard-bearers? What do they do with the unaligned supposedly flocking away from orange and green?
Ulster Unionism’s latest leader sounds like a tough guy, or at least impatient; that’s about it. For Steve Aiken, like Arlene Foster, the knowledge that their brand has long-lost whatever loyalty it had in the ‘motherland’ goes too deep for words.
Sinn Féin has made the possibility of border polls go a long way but it will not take them far beyond the next election, if it even plays well in that. Their situation is well worth consideration, though not here today.
The dust, though, is still flying in unionism after the latest British betrayal – though it’s most commonly been called an ‘English’ betrayal. Rising English nationalism there well may be but blaming that for readiness to sell out the DUP is a cop out. What it ducks is the inadequacy of ‘British’ as descriptor of identity, never mind as a homely catch-all for English, Welsh, Scots, as well as the forsaken Northern Irish who sometimes imagine they are British as Finchley but most of the time know themselves unloved, just another variety of Paddy.
Since Britishness has shown small ability to embrace black British people whose roots in a cold island go back generations, why would the Ulster British imagine themselves more favoured? Whiteness is a huge advantage, and yet. Viewing the DUP as representative of northern Protestants has done northern Protestants who believe in the Union no favours. It has also encouraged startling hypocrisy by people who should know better, indeed who do know better but pretend the opposite.
So the Times writer Danny Finkelstein, David Cameron’s scribe for his ‘autobiography’, indulged himself in the meanest of take-downs as Dodds, Foster and co were still getting their breath back. What a crew this was, Finkelstein wrote, so bigoted their founder, even rather close to loyalist paramilitaries. So negative, DUP-pers, and oh how backward on social issues.
This had allegedly all come as a shock to Lord Finkelstein, One Nation Conservative and calm centre of the Times Remain/Leave balancing act, winning cool guy who tweets as ‘Danny the Fink’.
The DUP backward, who knew? Certainly that had not been factored in to the Conservative discovery that ten DUP votes would take them out of a hole, in fact make them into a viable government. Almost as distasteful as Danny’s confected distaste was the unknowingness of below the line comment. There was little or no irritable ‘where have you been, Danny’, more ‘Well said, what a crew.’
If the party of Foster, Dodds, Wilson, Paisley were a little more likeable, what has befallen them would merit a drop of sympathy to dilute the mockery. But dislikeability is the least of their faults. The leader at Westminster delivered a warning about the unsettled state of his people, dressed up as a desperate-sounding plea for understanding. The party leader, never one for nuance, said fear voiced by the taoiseach that border checks could produce dissident violence was in part responsible for threats of loyalist violence. Not the prime minister who had tossed unionists aside, nor fear produced by her party’s misjudgement. Not me, gov, not responsible.
For three years, the DUP have demanded that Britain and the EU square a circle and arrange Brexit without creating any checks along the border. To a community already besieged in their own heads what they deliver is nonsense, and the opposite of leadership.
