Last week we had the absurd spectacle of Edwin Poots presenting his pretend climate change proposals – in draft you’ll note – at Cop26 in Glasgow. Not that anyone outside local news media here paid the slightest attention.
Nevertheless, what nerve, what effrontery.
Why is the north the only part of these islands that doesn’t have a climate change act and still won’t have next year? It’s because of the very person masquerading as a minister for climate change in Glasgow and his party full of climate change deniers.
Anyone not from the north daft enough to listen to Poots wouldn’t know that his vague, vacuous proposals don’t have the support of the Stormont assembly and are ridiculed as intentionally unambitious by any group here promoting climate change legislation. That’s why there are two bills going through the assembly; one produced by Clare Bailey with majority support and Poots’s pretend bill which only appeared after years of stalling in order to stave off Bailey’s bill which would have sailed through.
Poots and DUP members dragging their feet on climate change is just one of a vast list of DUP efforts to halt progress in any aspect of life. Why is this the only place in these islands which didn’t bring in abortion legislation? The DUP. Why is this the only place which, despite legal requirement, hasn’t commissioned abortion services? The DUP. Why, unlike for Scots Gàidhlig or Welsh, is there no language legislation which would recognise Irish? The DUP. Why are executive agenda items blocked for months by veto dozens and dozens of times? The DUP. Why was lockdown last autumn delayed by veto as infections and deaths soared? The DUP. And so on and so on.
It has been demonstrated conclusively by speeches and repeated actions or inaction that elements within the DUP are homophobic, misogynistic, islamophobic and the party contains a hefty bunch of science deniers including senior figures who flout Covid guidance and legislation. Some DUP councillors have even displayed their medieval pre-scientific revolution thinking by claiming the pandemic is retribution by a wrathful god.
Some people put the antediluvian attitudes of the DUP, their rejection of the modern world, down to the prevalence of Free Presbyterians among its elected representatives. That may be the case, but if so, it still does not explain why a small sect numbering less than 1 per cent of Protestants here managed to capture unionism and why others, the majority of unionists who believe the earth is spherical, that the universe is billions of years old, do not deride DUP politicians for want of a better word.
One answer is that most of these unionists don’t vote DUP, indeed many don’t vote at all. They are those Alex Kane identified years ago as ‘garden centre unionists’. Buying bedding plants is more interesting and fulfilling than unionist politics. Some of them last voted in the 1998 referendum on the Good Friday Agreement, but when they saw the UUP immediately revert to its old ways they gave up hope in unionist politics.
There you have part of the answer. Unionists who reject the DUP’s flat earth politics have no party to vote for and that has just been confirmed by the failure of the NIO’s great red, white and blue hope, Doug Beattie, to take on the DUP for fear of being castigated as, you’ve guessed it – a Lundy. Voting against the DUP obsession with gay conversion theory is one thing, but it’s just dumb to weigh in behind ‘The protocol must go’ brigade and stand at Stormont with Jim Allister and sectarian killer Billy Hutchinson in a misguided show of, all together now, unionist unity. No wonder Beattie’s poll ratings sank.
Donaldson, a mere front man for Johnson’s lickspittle Lord Frost, with his empty threats to pull down the executive, has regained the initiative in unionism and Beattie’s potential new voters have gone back to looking round garden centres.
