Not for the first time, Edwin Poots ended up with egg splattered all over his face.
He had just finished telling the BBC that there weren’t enough “white, Protestant, working-class people” left to keep the union safe. He had concluded therefore that unionists had to reach out to migrants who wanted to be part of the UK.
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than hordes of his constituents poured onto the streets setting fire to businesses those migrants owned, throwing bricks through the windows of houses they’d rented or bought, damaging their cars, and assaulting anyone they thought looked ‘foreign’.
Poots is obviously a slow learner. Peter Robinson was essentially saying the same thing a decade or so ago except in much more circumspect language. For those ideas to have percolated as far down as Poots must mean that the rapid and accelerating decline of unionism is a regular conversation in unionist political circles.
In his Iveagh House lecture in 2012, significant for its location, Robinson said: “Maintaining Northern Ireland’s position within the United Kingdom simply due to demographics should not be the height of our ambition. I want us to create a wide consensus for our present constitutional arrangements.” Hmm.
He got short shrift for his kite-flying from 2011 to 2013, not least from the Ian Óg/Sammy Wilson troglodyte wing of the party whose members were strongly opposed to making nationalists feel comfortable in the north. It was pressure from that wing of the party which led to Robinson’s infamous ‘letter from America’ ratting on the Maze Long Kesh development.
Yet although Robinson knew what the problem was and what might be done, he quickly dropped any practical efforts to remedy unionism’s long term difficulties. His subsequent behaviour and language contradicted what he had identified as the solutions.
In the current context it’s worth recalling that it was Robinson who defended a pastor under police investigation in 2014 for anti-Islamic preaching and who said he had nothing against Muslims, adding the appallingly patronising remark “I would have no difficulty in trusting Muslims to go down to the shop for me”. Ugh.
What’s pretty obvious is that for more than a decade, unionist leaders have seen the writing on the wall but have done nothing to acquaint their followers with the reality of electoral decline or the need to accept fundamental changes in their world view.
Poots himself gave a stark example when he pointed out that Martin Smyth had held South Belfast for years with something like a 70% share of the vote but that in the last election, the combined unionist vote was 22% (actually it was 27%).
However, there are other, more fundamental questions unionists need to address. John Wilson Foster, an academic and writer from here who spent most of his professional life in Canada, has produced a new set of essays, ‘Ireland Out of England and Other Inconveniences’, mainly concerned with the unionist dilemma.
He has interesting comparisons to make, such as the position of the Québecois in an Anglophone Canada. Mainly he concentrates on unionism’s isolation. As he says in one essay: “Ulster loyalists have been disowned by their prior allies after their usefulness was over with the collapse of heavy industry.”
In another, he examines how “the unionist gentry, middle and professional classes have gone AWOL… leaving unionism bare of any sophistication or much credibility.”
In an essay entitled ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ he considers “the abandonment of unionism by the parties, people and pundits across the water”.
For more than a decade, unionist leaders have seen the writing on the wall but have done nothing to acquaint their followers with the reality of electoral decline or the need to accept fundamental changes in their world view
Essentially what he is describing is a lost tribe, a community which over time has forfeited any of its former roles that were of value to England. What’s worse, the England that they are so attached to no longer exists.
Missing from unionism is any political or intellectual figure who can supply a raison d’être that doesn’t involve major unpalatable changes to the world loyalists still take for granted. As Foster points out, the middle and professional classes no longer participate in political unionism; it has no purpose other than trying to maintain an imagined status quo. (Ironically Foster, who might be writing about himself, doesn’t seem to include himself in that category).
Given all that, it seems pathetic that the best poor old Poots can come up with to resolve unionism’s shortcomings is to try to co-opt migrants into joining a nostalgic concept of the UK that no longer exists. Worse that he doesn’t even realise unionist voters totally repudiate his plan.