UNIONISTS feel an affinity with Israel. Sir Ronald Storrs, governor of the British so-called ‘Palestine mandate’ 1917-26, welcomed the arrival of Jewish colonists into the region after the Balfour declaration advocating a Jewish homeland.
Alex Kane: Northern Ireland is no longer fully in the UK... and it concerns me greatly
Arabs opposed the British mandate; they’d expected independence. Indeed, the British had led them to believe they would get it after the Turkish defeat. So Storrs hoped the more Jewish colonists the better because they would “form for England a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”. That went well, didn’t it?
You might ask, Alex, what that’s got to do with unionists’ ‘constitutional position’? Legitimacy, security, certainty, that’s what.
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The Arabs, in whose lands the British encouraged Jews to live, never accepted the legitimacy of the British creation or its later emanation, Israel, following ‘little loyal Jewish Ulster’s’ revolt against British rule. They never will. School atlases in most Arab countries don’t show Israel. The British created a mess and then cleared off. It’s what they do: India, Pakistan, Cyprus etc, etc.
They did it first in Ireland in 1921 after inventing the north with its ‘northern parliament of Ireland’ as they called it. Hypocritically they claimed it was temporary until Dublin and Belfast politicians reached some agreement, but the British knew that would never happen. Like so many other places subsequently, they had done a colossal injustice to the inhabitants. They didn’t care; they were gone.
As an artificial British creation, the north, like Israel, never gained legitimacy or security, never will. Despite appearances to the contrary the north is, in the words of former French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin, like Israel, ‘a historical parenthesis’, an artificial construct, its days numbered.
Every unionist knows that. The Irish Protocol sent a shiver down unionists’ spines because it’s a visible reminder of the temporary nature of this sub-polity, of its ineluctable demise.
Of course the protocol didn’t have the slightest effect on unionists’ constitutional position; you’ll notice only unionists have a constitutional position. Every court in the UK threw out that nonsensical notion which was a deliberately performative political stunt devoid of legal merit. The Supreme Court predictably decided that the protocol is no constitutional threat because only a referendum on reunification can alter the constitution.
And there, Alex, you have the nub. Unionists’ ‘constitutional position’ is entirely contingent. They must remain a majority here. Essentially that’s what the English have been telling unionists in different formats since 1948: the 1973 act, 1985, 1998. You’re only in the UK as long as a majority in the north want to be. This place, artificially contrived for you, has no other reason to exist.
Here's a paradox, Alex. Every time the British have constructed some Heath-Robinson contraption to make the north more palatable to its inhabitants, unionists have wrecked it, including the present arrangement. The harping on about the constitutional position is an anguished, forlorn, futile quest for permanence, for security and of course for legitimacy. Given this place’s nature as a British injustice done to the Irish people, none of those is available.
The protocol is a reminder that the north is and always has been a place apart from Britain, but ominously worse, part of the island of Ireland. That’s how everyone else in the world sees it.
Unlike any other part of the UK, the north has the legal right to secede, and remember, Alex, in 1998 a majority in the north voted for the right to secede, thereby acknowledging the temporary nature of this sub-polity.
So of course unionists ‘feel’ the protocol undermines their position because, while they know this place is different and its existence contingent, they naturally don’t like physical evidence that reminds them of that.
It seems they’d rather live in denial of their impermanence, illegitimacy and insecurity, preferring wishful thinking rather than a British government reminding them that when the chips are down, they’re disposable.
