Professor George Huxley, who died aged 90 on November 30, was professor of Greek at QUB from 1962-83 before moving to work in Athens, then Dublin.
In the sixties some students in Belfast nicknamed him ‘Hacksaw’ Huxley because he’d been fined a shilling (5p in new money) for threatening to cut the chains on the swings on a Sunday in a local park. Yes really.
Huxley was astonished and exasperated by the unionist troglodytes who ran society here through Stormont and local councils. He supported the civil rights movement and wrote to the Times threatening to withhold his rates until people here enjoyed the same rights as British citizens, altogether now, in the rest of the UK. He seemed to think that writing to the Times about their antics would expose and embarrass ignoramus unionists here. He soon learned otherwise being ridiculed by the arch-bigot Paisley’s scurrilous rag the Protestant Telegraph.
No unionist sprang to his defence. Obviously Ulster Unionists’ ideas of Britishness and British citizens’ rights were not the same as those in – you’ve guessed it – ‘the rest of the UK’. And so it remains. Bizarre as it may seem, despite all the codswallop from whinger-in-chief Donaldson about the north’s place in the UK, it’s northern nationalists who are more in tune with British citizens’ rights than unionists. It is northern nationalists and republicans, particularly Sinn Féin, whose attempts at Stormont to legislate for the same societal rights as in Britain are blocked by the DUP and often their craven little sir echoes, the UUP.
It’s not only in matters like abortion and same-sex marriage which require legislation where unionism remains frozen and obsessed with trying to control everyone’s lives according to their own pre-Enlightenment, hide-bound, worm’s eye view. The DUP’s inability to accept modern science, especially evolution, is a familiar and well deserved source for comedians. However, the DUP in particular regard multi-culturalism, human rights and equality as a republican plot and obstruct progress as much as possible. They look at diversity askance.
Repeatedly these people who claim to be British oppose British standards and reject legislation extending British rights to the north. The fact that their whinging about the protocol contradicts their behaviour in so many other more important matters remains eternally beyond their grasp.
Nevertheless, large numbers of unionists reject the DUP world view but they don’t register their opposition in elections. In last May’s assembly election the turnout in strongly unionist constituencies was 60-63 per cent, the third highest since the Good Friday Agreement. Of course not even all of that 60-63 per cent were unionist votes. In general elections it’s often less.
Why do they not register their rejection of the DUP? Alex Kane, the expert on unionist attitudes, reckons they’ve opted out of politics here and have become what he identified some years ago as ‘garden centre unionists’. They’d rather go to a garden centre than a polling station where there’s nothing for them. The unionist middle-class has largely walked away from politics. As one businessman said, the unionist middle-class went to the golf course when the Troubles erupted and stayed there.
All true, but there’s another reason. People who have openly opposed the DUP find they are subject to threats and intimidation. Business people fear their business may be boycotted. Nowadays unionist opponents of the DUP are threatened and vilified on social media by DUP supporting bloggers. They are accused of being Lundies, of splitting the vote, letting in ’themuns’. You heard all this repeated ad nauseam before the assembly election: accusations of splintering unionism, shredding the vote. Nonsense of course because in the PR system the more unionists voting the more unionists are likely to be returned.
In short the DUP, irrational, fossilised, introspective, ungrammatical, oppose democracy. They want to corner the market in unionism by any means. Why would any sensible, liberal, unionist who supports British standards even their wit to these troglodytes?
