To the chagrin of local hacks for whom he used to provide entertainment, Jim Allister has taken his one-man band to Westminster where few will hear its abrasive sound. The opportunities that he took to skewer dimwit local ministers will evaporate in the Commons. He will rarely if ever be called at prime minister’s questions and at Northern Ireland questions the place is empty. Presumably that’s why he flirted with the idea of joining forces with Farage’s Reform to put him on equal footing with the DUP which he helped reduce to five MPs by ousting the unlamented Ian Óg.
In the end however, Allister has opted to support Reform only on matters such as taxation and immigration agreed in his original deal with former leader Richard Tice. Is that wise? Is he wise aligning himself at all with Reform, the most noxious party in Westminster, tainted with racism and xenophobia and support for Donald Trump? Even, in the case of Reform’s leader, “admiring Putin as a political operator”.
Once again you have to ask what is it with unionist politicians that attracts them to the most extreme figures in British politics like Enoch Powell, or the crackpots in the now scattered and discredited European Research Group (ERG) who helped wreck the British economy? During the years of chaos when the ERG prevented their own government from making any rational agreement with the EU, Jeffrey Donaldson was an occasional guest speaker at their coven and the DUP was urging them on to even greater extremism.
The answer of course is that until Ukip and its reincarnations, the Brexit party and now Reform turned up, the DUP was the most right wing party in these islands. The DUP’s warped, outdated empire loyalist concept of Britishness seemed to fit with the imperial nostalgia, nativism and xenophobia Farage’s parties exemplified.
Like the DUP, in which remember, he was once a leading light, Allister has bought the guff Farage spouts about the union despite the fact like all the other English right wingers his map image of the union doesn’t include the north.
Farage referred to the deal with the TUV as “the Northern Ireland thing” and made an eejit out of Allister by backing Ian Óg against him. Farage also told the Irish Times there will be a united Ireland. Does Allister seriously believe in Farage’s constancy about the north and the Irish Sea border?
Does Allister actually support Farage’s taxation policy as he says? In case you don’t know, Reform’s policy, amongst other economic mayhem, is tax and spending cuts of £50 billion and private health insurance instead of the NHS. That would do wonders for people here, eh? It’s true most unionist voters are social and cultural conservatives or at least support the DUP and UUP who block any progress on these matters, as the UUP has surreptitiously done on abortion, but that doesn’t extend to cutting benefits, pensions and state intervention.
Like the DUP, in which remember, he was once a leading light, Jim Allister has bought the guff Farage spouts about the union despite the fact like all the other English right wingers his map image of the union doesn’t include the north
In that respect unionist voters turn out to be in line with other far right voters across Europe like Hungary, France, Italy and the Netherlands: left on the economy, public services, size of the state, but right on migration, social and sexual legislation and xenophobia. Maybe unionists as a whole do not fit this picture but there’s no way of knowing because, although in some constituencies a majority of unionists don’t vote, it's impossible to tell if they stay at home because they’re more progressive than the DUP and UUP. On the other hand they may vote Alliance as a liberal unionist party. Even if that’s so they still constitute a tiny minority of the unionist community.
Not that any unionist social or economic predilections matter at Westminster for the next 10 years given the size of Starmer’s majority. The damage of unionism’s right wing regressive outlook will be done at Stormont where they believe they can make the future like the past.
