MONDAY was tin-ear timing though doubtless arranged long ago, for the Queen to arrive on a friendly visit.
What unionists need now is the wit to face the likely unravelling of the UK, not more beaming delusion as led by Arlene Foster that this is part of a great British ‘nation’.
Last Thursday’s vote exposed a union riven by ugly emotion. It took no time at all for ‘foreigner’ to be hurled openly at people on English streets.
Adam Boulton the Sky presenter tweeted that at the weekend he and his family ‘witnessed three “when are you going home?” racist incidents.’
A Channel 4 reporter heard three inside five minutes. Our elder daughter phoned tearfully as she walked home from work about the workmates from Italy, Spain and France who’d been insulted repeatedly inside 48 hours.
Like our other daughter, neither of them gay, for heartening solidarity instead of hatred she looked forward to Sunday’s Gay Pride rally, star of the show the uniformed policeman who stopped the parade to propose to his boyfriend.
This was London, diverse and strongly pro-Remain. But Boulton was in London too. A Polish woman told the Independent she had feared the referendum result would increase intolerance, discrimination and racism ‘but I didn’t think it would become so aggressive and be so immediate.’
A share of the haters though clearly felt licensed by the Brexit victory, took the vote at its word and expected rapid expulsion of all ‘foreigners’.
But internal feuding preoccupied the leading political parties. The pile-up of incidents fought for attention with the coup to oust Jeremy Corbyn, apt enough and neatly timed illustration of the Labour Party’s irrelevance, its lack of influence on voters.
There may well be wriggling from Brexiteers, an effort to shuffle off responsibility. The ugliness, cards through letter-boxes with their hateful ‘no more Polish vermin’, shouts into faces, rants in streets and supermarkets have been too evidently cause and effect, too concerted and naked, to play down.
The despair people are voicing about the direction of British politics is founded on a slow burn of anxiety and indignation; that anti-immigrant passions were not just unleashed by the Leave vote but fed by the campaign led by the ungainly, dishonest alliance of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage, nudged on before that again by dog-whistles from David Cameron among others with his ‘swarms of migrants’.
Exploitation of the immigration issue to soak up rage about low-paid insecure employment, the housing shortage, failing health service, has been blatant – though not obvious enough, it seems, in the northern and midlands towns where former Labour voters have headed for UKIP. Now the contagion is out on the street, raging along.
Individuals fight the tide, tweeting sympathy and solidarity: ‘Disgusted that a minority are treating Brexit as green light for Xenophobia. PolesinUK we are with you, we are 1 people you are welcome.’ Public figures were slower to speak out. ‘This was not what I meant at all.’ As nobody said.
At least in the first 48 hours, the leaders of the campaigns on both sides kept their heads down, whether mourning, resting up, plotting, or just possibly, looking on with horror at what they had helped to produce.
And here? There was that Titanic picture of DUP rejoicing, Sammy Wilson, Edwin Poots et al waving their hands in the air and beaming.
Foster, true to her now familiar first ministerial form, showed her care for all ‘the people of Northern Ireland’ by announcing she was proud of the vote to leave, though the majority had done the opposite.
A politician whose proudest boast is her determination to prevent a republican rewrite of Troubles history, she rewrote a vote only hours old. In a less public statement, but the same majoritarian spirit, she also supported the Whiterock Orangemen against the Parades Commission’s decision to penalise them - for displaying paramilitary sympathy as well as refusing talks.
Martin McGuinness missed an opportunity to fill the role of first minister that Foster flouts, unionist leader as wrong about Britain as she wilfully misrepresents this place.
Wouldn’t it have been fine to hear the deputy first express concern for incomers bound to take yet more abuse now - as well as insisting, very properly as he did, on the fact of a majority vote unionists are incapable of recognising unless it’s a unionist one.
Instead the republican machine burbled about a border poll. Next up, a royal handshake.
