Alex Kane: Unionism needs more than kneejerk reactions

Along with those there were at least a dozen fringe groups and one-man bandwagons. And let’s not forget the ‘political fronts’ linked to as assortment of paramilitary groups. Today, we have the DUP, UUP, PUP, TUV, Conservatives and the remnants of Ukip in play, along with, if memory serves me, a local wing of the new Brexit Party.

That’s an awful lot of voices, vehicles and variations for what is, to all intents and purposes, a smallish, regional unionism. Indeed, there is often so much background noise, much of it contradictory and acrimonious, that it’s very difficult to know what the precise message is supposed to be. For example, the DUP, UUP, PUP and TUV all believe in Northern Ireland remaining within the United Kingdom: and then what? What else unites them. Or, putting that another way, what divides them? What are the specific differences between, for example, the DUP and the UUP?

We may get an answer to that question between now and November 9, when the UUP will choose the successor to Robin Swann. At the time of writing (Sunday morning) the only declared candidate is Steve Aiken, with Doug Beattie due to confirm his intentions by the time you’re reading this. But if it is Doug or Steve (and Robbie Butler has also been mentioned) what will they do as leader which will put significant distance between the party and the DUP? How do they win back the drift of former UUP voters to Alliance? Crucially, can they even unite the UUP around a coherent, unifying platform; something which, judging by election results, their predecessors since Trimble have failed to do.

But even if a new UUP leader does unite the party around a platform which clearly differentiates it from the DUP, what happens next? How does he win back voters from the DUP if he doesn’t launch an attack on the DUP and, in so doing, tumble into the usual old ding-dong which divides unionism even more? How does he win back voters from Alliance as well as those who went to the DUP? How does he deal with issues like same-sex-marriage and abortion, for instance, issues on which both Steve and Doug are probably out of step with a majority of UUP members and voters? How does he deal with Brexit?

The DUP, of course, has its own problems. It may try and pretend – albeit with very little conviction – that it has some control over Boris Johnson; but it doesn’t. Johnson has, as some of us predicted he would, betrayed them twice and he will do it again. Rees-Mogg is already squirming as he asks Leavers to ‘trust’ the PM and it looks like he’s accepted that more concessions will be demanded of Foster and Dodds. So the DUP will be forced into numbers-game territory on the future of the Union and a majority of unionists – even those who believe that the DUP were too stupid and cocky to acknowledge that Johnson’s interests weren’t necessarily their interests – will row in behind the party in the coming election.

That’s why I wasn’t surprised when PUP leader Billy Hutchinson (who, I think, has said he voted Remain) told his annual conference on Saturday that a Unionist Forum was required to meet the challenges of the growing demands for Irish unity and what might look like changes to Northern Ireland’s constitutional status. The trouble is that unionist unity projects rarely end well: the last one, in 2013, broke down fairly quickly. And even though the combined efforts of unionism/loyalism destroyed Brian Faulkner and Sunningdale in 1974, they weren’t capable of installing a replacement.

Billy may also have been responding to evidence that there are elements of loyalism which are preparing ‘action if Boris shafts’ Northern Ireland. Let me tell those elements something. I stood in the grounds of Stormont, along with tens of thousands of others, in March 1972, when NI’s Parliament sat for the last time. I observed rallies organised by Bill Craig’s Vanguard in 72/73. I was doing my A-levels in 1974 and saw the footage of thousands of young UDA men parading in Belfast during the UWC strike. I was one of almost a quarter of a million people who stood outside Belfast City Hall in November 1985 to protest against the Anglo-Irish Agreement. I remember the anger as though it were yesterday. I remember the talk of ‘taking the battle to the enemy’. But I also know that unionism gained nothing.

A few years later, when I first started political commentary, I argued that unionism needed to move beyond anger, kneejerk protest and always predictable strategy and work more on setting out and selling the value of unionism, deconstructing the arguments of our opponents and reaching out with the aim of negotiating, rather than being forced by others into a deal. Sadly, we – and yes, it was the collective failure of unionism – failed to move of our own accord and in our own interests: which meant we just argued with each other and then had to respond to what others had done.

But if there is to be a unionist forum then I’d like it to consider one very difficult, very uncomfortable question: When Westminster has had, down the years, to make a choice between the interests of unionism and the interests of Irish nationalism, why, so often, does it lean towards nationalism? I’ve heard every prime minister since Edward Heath invoke a variation of the ‘precious Union’ mantra; and yet I’ve also seen everyone of them act in a way that angers even moderate, pan-UK unionists like myself.

The answer to that question is vital if unionism is to understand itself and its own strategies, as well as understanding how and why others view us as they do. One thing I do know: threatening those with whom we wish to share the UK is, to put it bluntly, bloody stupid.