The political orphaning of moderate unionism

NI Life And Times 2015

The unionist people are far ahead of unionist politics. I've written here that for all the madness there is much normality in Northern Ireland - there are Two Worlds in Northern Ireland. Alex Kane wrote that "people in Northern Ireland are much more liberal, laid back and genuinely cosmopolitan than the main unionist parties realise." Newton Emerson wrote:

"The political orphaning of moderate unionism has been a particular source of wonder and despair. 

What party represents the vast majority of unionists — those who are not Orangemen, bandsmen, gunmen, Bible-bashers, flag-flyers, bonfire-builders or all the other overlapping little constituencies that unionist politicians never dare to disappoint? What party can represent the 400,000 “garden centre” Protestants who refuse to vote, or appeal to any Catholic “economic unionists” who might just accept a British province that treated them with respect? How has such a substantial need for representation not been met for almost a century?"

The two worlds of Northern Ireland, Ctd

Gerald Dawe said:

"I come from a Protestant background, but as a young fellow I had lots of Catholic and Jewish friends, and non-religious friends. We all used to hang out together, and we used to go to dances together, we used to party together, we used to go on holidays together. It was a very mixed group. But by the early ’70s all that changed. I used to walk girls home over to west Belfast and it never was a problem, but when The Troubles really started to dig in, that kind of freedom disappeared. I mean you’d take your life in your hands… Belfast became a very dark and dangerous city. People didn’t go out after 7 or 8 o’clock at night. It was pretty grim … It wasn’t the same city that I had known growing up."

Culture Night - A middle class 12th

A cartoon of Belfast's Culture Night by Ian Knox

Newton Emerson wrote that the annual Culture Night shows how many extremely middle-class people there are in Belfast. Culture Night is, in his words, "A sort of middle-class Twelfth." He also wrote:

Jamie Bryson - Latex Loyalist

Being born middle class but believing you're loyalist. 

Jamie Bryson is a middle class imposter. Just as Hitler wasn't German, Jamie Bryson isn't Working Class protestant. (I invoke Godwin's Law as a point of irony because Bryson does it so regularly.) This has been the grand sham of Northern Ireland since December 3 2012: The self-appointed loyalist big mouth isn't even working class.

Michael Longley - Green wank and Orange wank

Michael Longley with his portrait by Colin Davidson. See Longley with Mallie and I here.

Michael Longley met David Remnick on his 1994 visit to Belfast. They went for a walk and talk at the Giant’s Ring in South Belfast in 1994.

"These sides are divided from each other in their souls. They adhere to ridiculous visions of themselves and their histories. I call it ‘the green wank’ and ‘the orange wank’."

Being middle class

Simon Hattenstone wrote in the Guardian:

"[Rod Liddle] talks about his return to London as a young man (he was born in Bermondsey, hence his allegiance to Millwall) to study at London School of Economics and how shocked he was to encounter students who were so posh and so privileged and just so bloody... liberal. Before that he had considered himself middle-class (his father ended up as a tax inspector, his mother worked at the then DHSS). But not any more. "The gap between my family and the poorest family in Middlesbrough was tiny, and the gap between my family and the London lot was just enormous. And that difference has got bigger and bigger and bigger."

Alan Bennett experienced something similar:

"If the dons [at Trinity College, Cambridge] were genial some of my fellow candidates were less so. That weekend was the first time I had come across public schoolboys in the mass and I was appalled. They were loud, self-confident and all seemed to know one another, shouting down the table to prove it while also being shockingly greedy. Public school they might be but they were louts. Seated at long refectory tables beneath the mellow portraits of Tudor and Stuart grandees, neat, timorous and genteel we grammar school boys were the interlopers; these slobs, as they seemed to me, the party in possession."