If unionism is divided it will be in a weak negotiating position
Our prime minister, standing on the steps of 10 Downing Street, called for national healing.
Widely viewed as a call to triumphant Brexiters and disgruntled Remainers to make peace, Boris’s call has an immediate application here in Northern Ireland.
The bitter feud between the DUP and the UUP presents the ordinary unionist with the dire prospect, once again, of divided unionists negotiating from a position of weakness and not of strength.
Boris’s advocacy of ‘healing’ may be rejected by the leaders of the UUP and DUP; but it is the unionist people who will have to swallow the concessions to Sinn Fein that await us around the corner.
For a decade I, along with the redoubtable Walter Love, presented the BBC’s Twelfth commentary, we witnesses those orange banners float past with the axiom that secured the Union and our British way of life: ‘united we stand; divided we fall.’
Progressive people think differently now, resulting in uncertainty, increasing sectarian divisions and a rush for jobs in a devolved assembly, in desperate need of structural reform (read ‘Burned’!).
Dr Clifford Smyth,
Belfast BT6