The crisis in Unionism

by Michael Collins

“What a fool I was. I was only a puppet, and so was Ulster, and so was Ireland, in the political game that was to get the Conservative Party into power.”[1]

Article originally published in Issue 4 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:

A century on from when he uttered them, the bitter words of Edward Carson will resonate deeply with the DUP today. Having propped up the Tories for years, voting alongside them to introduce welfare reform, cutting free school meals for primary school children – and a raft of other measures aimed at punishing the poor – the DUP can hardly complain about the bedfellows they keep.

But it is not just the Tories by whom Foster might feel ‘sacrificed’ on the ‘altar of political expediency’, as Carson once put it. She becomes the first-ever DUP leader to face an open leadership challenge in her own party, having resigned following a vote of no confidence from 75% of party MLAs and MPs.

While media pundits and political commentators have been quick to attribute Unionism’s current crisis to an ‘identity crisis’ arising from the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol, in truth, much larger forces are in play. In their letter of no confidence, DUP MLAs and MPs themselves admitted that their primary concern was over ‘the future of unionism, Ulster conservatism and the DUP.’[2]

Reactionaries revolt 

While pressure has been building on Foster for months, the incident which triggered the internal revolt was her urging DUP members to abstain rather than vote against a motion proposing to ban “gay conversion therapy” in an Assembly debate in April.

Given Foster’s unapologetic earlier use of the petition of concern to obstruct LGBTQ+ rights, a last-ditch effort on her part to shift the DUP toward a more moderate position rings hollow, and should be called out for the desperate and transparent attempt to hold on in the face of a haemorrhaging of hard-line Unionists over the disaster that the DUP has delivered around Brexit. Having alienated the “moderate” middle and provoked seething anger among the hard right of the party, Foster faced the difficult challenge of trying to ride both horses at once, and in the end, the hardliners – with a nod to the loyalist paramilitaries with whom they have become increasingly close in recent months – threw her off. Foster’s unwillingness to take a forthright stand on “conversion therapy” was the final straw for Ian Paisley’s heirs among the religious fundamentalists, whose control over the DUP has been waning for some time, and who drew a line on the issue of gay rights. The vast majority of MLAs defied Foster by voting against the motion and– upon their defeat – triggered the leadership challenge shortly thereafter.

Whilst we can say with a fair degree of certainty the ‘mass rebellion’[3] inside the DUP signals the aim of the party to tack right on LGBTQ+ rights, it also strongly signals the DUP’s intent to toughen their stance against the progressive march towards equality in general. In fact, we have already witnessed the DUP taking the lead in Stormont’s attempt to roll back abortion reform, and its efforts to obstruct LGBTQ+ equality and Irish language rights are well documented.

The re-ascension of the “Save Ulster from Sodomy” wing to the helm of the DUP and their forcing of its former captain to walk the plank, will not, however, bring the DUP to a problem-free paradise. Recent polls show the party haemorrhaging support both to its right and to the centre, and it is likely to become the second-largest party (behind Sinn Féin) at Stormont after the next Assembly election. A leaked internal DUP document confirms this, acknowledging the party is set to lose a swathe of MLAs, MPs and Councillors should its current trajectory continue.

A rightward turn by the DUP could potentially jettison whatever liberal ground it still manages to hold, but that appears a risk worth taking for the majority of DUP MLAs and MPs, who fear an encroachment from Jim Allister’s TUV onto their reactionary base more than anything. This will be unfamiliar terrain for the DUP, which has sustained a close relationship with the loyalist right all through its time at Stormont, and which in recent months has prominently abetted the paramilitary rump in heightening tensions over Brexit and fanning the flames of sectarianism. 

This approach is highlighted adequately in ex-First Minister Peter Robinson’s recent Newsletter column, where he provides his thoughts on the rationale behind recent loyalist unrest: “I can think of no period over my 50 years in politics where unionists have felt more alienated than they are now.”[4] Robinson accredits this alienation not to the deep poverty faced by hard-hit communities like the Shankill or Derry’s Waterside, nor to the disenfranchisement felt by a generation left behind by the so called peace process, but to a ‘feeling of deflation and disappointment’ because of what he describes as the ‘willingness of government to repeatedly cave-in to republicans.’ He ends with what could only be interpreted as an ominous warning or a thinly veiled threat: “It would be wrong to assume that in time unionists will calm down and eventually acquiesce. That is not my assessment. We are perilously close to a line which, when crossed, will lock us all into a pattern all too familiar to my generation. The genie will not easily be squeezed back into the bottle.”

This is a classic DUP tactic of stoking sectarian division, whipping up tension, and giving a veiled nod of encouragement to violence while attempting to keep adequate distance in order to capitalise on the inevitable polarisation that follows. It’s a tried and tested method for the DUP, and one that goes back to the by-gone-days of Ian Paisley­­ – infamously compared by loyalist paramilitaries to ‘the Grand Old Duke of York’ for having led them up a hill only to usher them back down again. This is precisely the sort of veiled, inflammatory language the DUP has used to stoke divisions in the past, and in recent months it has been designed entirely to lend an air of political legitimacy to loyalist aggression.

When a bus driver’s vehicle was hijacked and set alight on the Shankill Road, for example, Foster took the opportunity to tweet that the incident served only as a ‘distraction from the real enemy of Sinn Féin’. The tweet was later removed, but the DUP’s attempts to pass blame for the riots ignores the glaring fact that for months DUP representatives have been actively stoking tensions. The flaring of street violence cannot be separated from Sammy Wilson’s calls to ‘resist the protocol by any means necessary’, even – in his own words – through ‘guerrilla warfare’,[5] or from Foster’s meetings with the Loyalist Community Council (LCC) which precipitated the trouble.

Legitimising loyalist paramilitaries

The LCC – comprised of the UVF, Red Hand Commandos, the UDA and other paramilitary organisations – receives political legitimisation from the NI Executive. The Social Investment Fund (SIF), too, has been criticised for going to “projects’’ often connected to loyalist paramilitaries and is widely seen as a Sinn Féin/DUP slush fund used to maintain patronage.[6] LCC spokesperson David Campbell refused to comment during the weeks of loyalist rioting, despite being repeatedly questioned by journalists. But there was no ambiguity as to where the Loyalist Community Council stood given Campbell’s remarks in February that loyalism would be prepared to ‘fight physically to maintain our freedoms within the UK’.

There are real forces, then, stoking the flames of sectarian discontent that have surfaced in recent weeks – and the DUP has provided them political cover in an effort to shore up its traditional base. Yet much of the media have uncritically embraced the DUP’s justification for the upsurge of violence as stemming primarily from a crisis of ‘unionist identity’ resulting from the imposition of customs checks at the Irish Sea.

Reaping what they sow

But as Seán Mitchell has pointed out,[7] the DUP’s outrage over customs checks and its complaints that the Union is threatened by a divergence of policy between Stormont and Westminster are ‘grossly inconsistent’. The DUP are proven hypocrites, having been the most forthright in insisting that Stormont maintain separate laws for abortion, equal marriage and Irish language rights, around each of which they have actively resisted any attempts by Westminster to bring the region in line with the rest of the UK.

And despite the DUP’s protestations of Tory betrayal, it shares a large portion of the blame for the implementation of a so-called Irish Sea border. It was, after all, the DUP which backed Boris Johnson and Rees Moggs’s breakaway Eurosceptic European Research Group in their effort to scupper Theresa May’s original backstop deal, which aimed to prevent customs checks at the Irish Sea. The DUP’s insistence on a hard Brexit at all costs, and its natural tendency to align itself with the right-wing of British Conservatism, could signal the era of its own demise.

Crisis in reaction

Twenty-first century Unionism faces a deep and intractable predicament which Marxists have identified as a ‘permanent crisis’.[8] The old material basis that ensured Unionist hegemony in the Northern State for more than half a century is gone. There is no longer preferential treatment for a layer of skilled Protestant workers in the shipyards, the engineering works or the linen mills. Unionist bosses no longer call the shots in Northern Ireland, but share a much thinner share of the local economy with a substantial Catholic middle class. Both are subordinated to the whims and pressures of global capital. Though phantoms of the violent past linger potently in the present, no one from either side of the divide seriously entertains any illusion that Northern Ireland can resurrect its glory days as a ‘Protestant state for a Protestant people’.

Unionism must grapple with the real desire that exists among people to move away from division, to have genuine social progress. But reconciling this with their historic base of Orangeism, an inherently sectarian ideology, has proven an impossible task. The real test will not be whether the DUP – or indeed Unionism as a whole – can opportunistically shift over questions like equal marriage or the Irish language to save face. In the end, any sustained stability requires a fundamental break with loyalism – an explicitly exclusionary and reactionary ideology, incompatible with the rights of minorities or the politics of anti-sectarianism, holding on to a paramilitary rump who,  though legitimised and funded by the institutions at Stormont, are widely detested in the working-class areas they claim to represent.

Regardless of whether Sinn Féin or DUP hold the First Minister position after the next Assembly election, the Stormont institutions will never provide a remedy to sectarianism. The riots we witnessed are an ongoing symptom of Stormont’s inherent division, and the rampant poverty and inequality that exists on both sides of the divide persist more than two decades after the Belfast Agreement because all five of the Executive parties have willingly followed the Tory’s neo-liberal playbook. Across the divide, working-class communities have seen no benefit from the so-called peace dividend. Years of Stormont austerity, welfare reform, privatization, cuts to mental health services and public sector pay freezes have all fed the deep alienation that allows sectarian ideas to thrive, even in a context where the material base of the old Orange state is but a fading memory. A century on from partition, the need for a viable, fighting socialist organisation could hardly be more urgent.

Michael Collins is a People Before Profit Councillor for the Colin area of West Belfast.

Notes

1. api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1921/dec/14/address-in-reply-to-his-majestys-most

2. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-56910046

3. belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/jim-wells-claims-dup-pressure-overgay-conversion-therapy-vote-amid-party-mass-rebellion-40357155.html

4. newsletter.co.uk/news/opinion/columnists/peter-robinson-unionists-are-more-alienated-than-i-have-seen-at-any-time-in-my-50-years-in-politics-3179294

5. belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/sammy-wilson-stands-by-guerilla-warfare-comments-saying-dup-will-use-every-tactic-to-destroy-protocol-40144282.html

6. belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/the-new-rhi-social-investment-fund-dished-out-millions-despite-conflicts-of-interest-and-shoddy-records-37504365.html

7. spectrejournal.com/resurgent-sectarianism-in-the-north-of-ireland/?fbclid=IwAR20J2u1gTqFRjwDHRCMuo-aNReGwGKMeHsOOTqLyEnVs9ukSpAhrLjgmDU

8. irishmarxistreview.net/index.php/imr/article/view/110