Waving the flag is holding back the working classes

Ian Paisley Junior takes the biscuit, and apparently anything else he can lay his hands on.
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And yet commentators tell us he’ll romp home if there’s a by-election. They assume the people of North Antrim will automatically follow the flag.

That’s a huge factor in holding working class people here back, the notion that waving one flag or the other in people’s faces will blind them to where their class interests lie.

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We appeal to Protestant working-class people to take a hard look at the DUP and ask whether it really represents their interests — backing “welfare reform”, depriving thousands of families even of the necessities of life, opposing equal marriage and a woman’s right to choose, sneering at climate change, making a big deal of the Irish language, lining up with the Tories at Westminster.

We all know this is NOT representative of the mass of the Protestant people.

We need to get over not just the effects of sectarianism but over sectarianism itself. This is the never-ending source of our political ills.

We want the axis of our politics turned around, from community to class.

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There will be no solution to problems arising from poverty and inequality in the Protestant community which would not also be a solution to the same problems in the Catholic community.

If we see the world in this perspective, we will be much better placed to discuss and deal with the seemingly unsolvable Orange/Green issues.

The situation is crying out for an alternative to unionism and nationalism.

Everybody is entitled to their sense of identity. But that doesn’t have to be the only or the main basis of political allegiance.

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We want to see mass struggles against deprivation and discrimination of any sort.

We want a radical alternative to the way things are.

We shouldn’t put up any longer with the likes of Ian Paisley.

Eamonn McCann, Londonderry

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