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NY Times Op-Ed, Nov. 2, 2018
The Last Gasp of Northern Ireland
A hard-line loyalist party has British politics in its death grip,
because it knows that its cause is dying.
By Richard Seymour
(Mr. Seymour grew up in Northern Ireland and writes about British politics.)
Nov. 2, 2018
Image
Bullet holes marked a sign post at the border of Ireland and Northern
Ireland last July.CreditCreditCharles Mcquillan/Getty Images
LONDON — The Democratic Unionist Party, the hard-line Northern Irish
Protestant party that essentially has both Prime Minister Theresa May
and the Brexit process in a death grip, is not merely stupid or
fanatical. The party understands that its fortunes depend on an
increasingly threatened British nationalism.
Unionism is dying in Northern Ireland. During the 30-year war, the
Protestant majority was mostly loyal, even though Northern Ireland was
one of the the poorest parts of the United Kingdom. With a dwindling
industrial base, it was subsidized by war, infused with money for an
occupying army and giant, garrisoned stations full of police officers.
When I was growing up in the 1980s, in a small Protestant town in the
east of the six counties, Protestants could believe that those men of
violence were there for us, that the Union was ours. Electoral
gerrymandering shored up Unionist power. There were jobs for the
“Prods,” as Protestants were known. Protestants occupied most of the
skilled work and the few professional and managerial jobs available. The
south of Ireland was poor, and everyday chauvinism said Catholics were
poor because they were backward and dirty, and brought it on themselves.
“That’s a Protestant-looking house,” mothers would chirp after tidying up.
The annual Twelfth of July bonfires and parades, celebrating the history
of Ulster Loyalism, saw effigies of wicked Papists burned for public
edification and the delight of inebriated Loyalists. This was “our
culture.” These festivities helped create a lynch mob atmosphere,
leading to the murder of Catholics. Every year, the stories were the
same: Bonfire night was a night for petty terror and bricking Catholic
windows. Parades day was a day for blood. I recall that one year during
my childhood, members of a local Loyalist flute band stabbed a Catholic
bus driver repeatedly; a woman tried to stanch the bleeding by wrapping
him in towels, but when the ambulance arrived, he was dead. We heard
this story on the radio, on the way back from watching a parade. Many
paid with blood for Protestant loyalty to Britain.
What, today, is the point of Northern Ireland? Built for perpetual war
to keep the British in Ireland, it has lost its war, and with it the
enormous, animating reservoirs of feeling and meaning that kept the
“Prods” loyal. The barracks are gone, the stations empty hulks. Peace
brought multinationals and chain stores, and the town centers grew
deathly quiet. The bunting, flags and murals still appear in some
Protestant heartlands, if local councils don’t dare to remove them. But
they cut a faded figure in just another north British region struggling
to lure investors with lower corporate taxes.
Parades draw diminishing, aging crowds. Young, working-class Protestants
once waved banners celebrating Ulster plantation lords, as though their
lives were connected to such vicious men. Now they want out. Every year,
more than a third of students flee Northern Ireland. More would if they
could: A Belfast Telegraph survey of young people found that two-thirds
want to leave. Ironically, the communal institutions bequeathed by Good
Friday prolong sectarian allegiances, running Stormont, the Northern
Irish assembly, on the principle of communal power-sharing.
Hence the Democratic Unionist Party’s ability to stalemate the government.
Prime Minister May formed a coalition with the D.U.P. after losing her
parliamentary majority in last year’s snap election. In exchange for
keeping her in office, she gave the hard-line Unionists veto power over
Brexit negotiations. The D.U.P., which has a history of ties to
gunrunning and paramilitarism, has never been easy to deal with. Its
leadership is based in the Free Presbyterian Church, the fundamentalist
sect founded in 1951 by the former D.U.P. leader Ian Paisley. It has
been described by the journalist Owen Jones as “the political wing of
the 17th century.” During the 1980s, campaigning against Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher’s negotiated settlement with the Irish Republic, its
slogan blared from every lamppost in Northern Ireland: “Ulster Says No.”
Ulster is saying no again. Mrs. May, to satisfy her party, has to get
Britain out of the European customs union, restoring a customs border
between the United Kingdom and the European Union. The D.U.P. welcomes
that. But the Good Friday agreement presupposes a “soft” border between
the north and south of Ireland. Mrs. May, to preserve the agreement,
proposes keeping Northern Ireland in the customs union. That means a
customs border between Northern Ireland and the rest of Britain. There,
the D.U.P. draws a “blood red” line. That, it says, mortally threatens
the Union.
The panic has a basis in reality. In the Northern Ireland Assembly
elections of 2017, Unionism lost its majority. Sinn Fein came close to
beating the D.U.P. as the biggest single party. In the 2016 referendum,
most people in Northern Ireland voted against the D.U.P.’s pro-Brexit
position. Census figures show a long-term decline in the share of
Protestants, who tend to be Unionist voters, with a Catholic majority
possible by 2021. An ironic turn for a statelet built to preserve a
loyal Protestant majority.
For the theocrats at the core of the D.U.P. leadership, this is a threat
to the political self-defense of Protestants against, as Ian Paisley
used to put it, the Papal Antichrist. Hence, the D.U.P. obstructs gay
marriage, abortion rights and Irish language rights. The party and its
Loyalist base are waging a cultural war to defend “Britishness.” They’ll
spoil a deal with the European Union, even if the Good Friday Agreement
must be rewritten or collapses.
In mainland Britain, the Brexit right laps this up. These politicians,
representing the right wing of the Conservative Party and those who have
broken from it over Europe since the 1990s, have seen the crisis coming,
too. The Union, forged by empire, looks purposeless; Britishness
forlorn. The institutions of government are losing legitimacy. The
Conservative Party has been in a state of decline, particularly since
the 1990s. Scotland almost seceded in 2014. A resurgent left under the
Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn poses its own solution to the
pervading sense of collapse.
The Brexit right blames all of this on a liberal establishment allied to
Europe. It claims that European rules have held back business, weakened
the pound and eroded national self-determination. By quitting the
European Union, the Brexiteers hope to break that establishment and
empower the Conservative Party’s small-business base.
The D.U.P. and the Brexit right don’t have identical priorities.
Brexiteers want a low-wage, low-tax economy to compete with the European
Union. The D.U.P., with a more working-class base, often votes with
Labour on issues like public spending. But they share the vocabulary of
“Britishness,” and the D.U.P. would go along with “free market” reforms
as long as Northern Ireland received generous funding.
If they succeed in forcing a “hard” Brexit and in imposing their
post-Brexit settlement, they would further weaken the Union. They would
exacerbate the regionalized class inequalities that brought Scotland to
the brink of departure. In Ireland, north and south, Sinn Fein is a
growing power. It is heading to a plurality in the Assembly. A crisis
for the Good Friday Agreement, already stretched by D.U.P.
obstructionism, is leading Sinn Fein to put a united Ireland back on the
agenda. Though unlikely in the short-term, it seems more plausible than
Brexit did just five years ago.
Loyalists, faced with a threat to the Union, would put up a fight. The
paramilitaries still exist. But in the pebbledash, gray concrete,
rained-on estates of Northern Ireland, Unionism is slowly dying. And
with it, an idea of Britain.
Richard Seymour is an editor at Salvage magazine and the author, most
recently, of “Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics.”
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