NI POLITICS: What the other side's like
Irish nationalism in full fig; toilet-sex; Olive; IDS does good!
Build the wall up higher
After Unionism in the City of Londonderry gave up its long and brave electoral struggle, and Irish nationalists (lead by John ‘reconciliation’ Hume) gained a majority on the council, what was the first thing this SDLP-led regime did? Did they attempt to tackle endemic housing problems, disproportionately affecting Catholic voters? Or did they perhaps set about doing something to help bring investment back into the bombed-out hulk that was the city centre, thus challenging those horrendous figures for Catholic joblessness in the North West? No, No, NO. What, of course, the SDLP did, as its first and over-weening priority, was to campaign to have the name of the City changed. Or rather, since the Council couldn’t even begin to do this itself, to gain permission from the Northern Ireland Office that the name of the local authority which the Maiden City was in, could be changed. By unhappy chance, the relevant junior NIO minister that this request came up to was none other than ‘Chris’ Patten. And the rest, as they say, is district council headed notepaper history. Now, however, they’re at it again, but this time it falls to Labour to stand up to the intolerant and exclusivist demands of Irish nationalism.
Under pressure from Sinn Fein, the SDLP this week changed its hallowed position that, people could call the City what they want (though, as pointed out above, the local authority will, naturally, call itself our tribe’s call-sign). Now the SDLP is going along with the Republican scheme to have the City’s actual name changed to ‘Derry’, and refusing to enter into correspondence with anyone counter-revolutionary enough to use ‘Londonderry’ in communications with the council. One would like to dismiss this as silliness, albeit poisonously sectarian silliness, of the sort councillors everywhere engage in [my distinguished colleague Dr Lackland is fulsome about the activities of their mainland counterparts], just as one ought to be confident that it won’t get anywhere. After all, the procedure Sinn Fein have compelled the SDLP to support is, to get to the crux of it, an appeal to HM the Queen to consent to the renaming of the City. Whether her Majesty will receive adequate advice from her ministers is no longer something we can be sure about.
Springing into life, like a man facing an imminent leadership election, David Trimble denounced this move as ‘offensive’ (that man really has been spending too long in the company of the English and the university-educated — what real Ulsterman ever truly objected to mere ‘offensive’ talk? The Quondam First Minister delivered his broadside whilst in the Maiden City itself, at Thornhill (a Catholic girls’ Grammar school) to be precise, and this bearded the city’s MLA, SDLP leader Mark Durkan no end. As he’s done before, the former Deputy First Minister revealed what Mr Trimble had got up to, behind the closed doors of devolved government. Quite rightly the apostle of tolerance, pluralism and parity of esteem, had insisted that all press releases from their conjoined office that touched on the Maiden City must only refer to ‘Londonderry’ and never to ‘Derry’. Which is all something of a nuisance, if you’re no longer prepared to take your stand on any given issue on the more familiar lines of ‘here I stand, I can do no other’.
The deficiencies, though, of David Trimble’s grand strategy as Unionist leader are depressingly apparent to all by now — what dawns slowly, if at all, with most, is the sheer, naked sectarianism even of those media favourites, the SDLP. It starts with the BBC’s grating habit of habitually referring to, for one, ‘the Protestant Ulster Unionist Party’, whilst always making reference to some weird compound known as the ‘largely catholic SDLP’. This, as ever, reverses the truth. For more than twenty years now, at every province-wide election, the SDLP has failed to stand any manner of Protestant candidate, and attracts nothing in the way of ‘Protestant’ votes. The record of the UUP is hardly spotless, but it, however, has fielded catholic candidates at every election it has ever contested, and has seen catholics elected in its interest to every forum on offer, including the present Assembly. Then there is the semi-secular canonisation of John Hume to contend with. This is so malevolent that we’ll come back to it at great length at some later point.
From its putrid core, the SDLP adheres to the vile nationalist doctrine of otherness and exclusivity. For them, there is the narrow prospect of their visions of 'Irishness’, and nothing else. Where their Unionist peers attempt, however inadequately, to enunciate a doctrine predicated on inclusivity, multi-culturalism, multi-ethnicity and every other boon of the age, the SDLP remains mired in the peasant fanaticism which has sustained Irish nationalism since it crawled out of the bog it emerged from. The only thing worth meeting this with is determination, and sadly the truckling David Trimble shows very little of that these days.
What Ulster usually misses
Now that the government has turned its ceaseless striving to ending discrimination (and where were the Bercows, Gibbs, et al to speak up for this agenda too? why was the Conservative party’s response left only to the predictable, the fusty, and the morally reactionary?), and intends to legalise ‘cottaging’, which is to say the gay male urge to copulate in public loos, it’s time to think about the ‘equality agenda’ mainland Britain presently enjoys. It’s difficult precisely to know what form of discrimination gays were being subject to, by sexual intercourse in council bogs being a criminal offence, but there you go, it takes all sorts, and this was something ‘gay rights’ campaigners got upset about, so Hillary Benn (the relevant Home Office minister) is swinging into action.
As just one small observation about the comprehensive futility of equality, whether legislated by this regime, or intellectually advocated by those diseased offshoots of the progressive weed, our very own Portilloites, consider this: what about, in the immortal words of Eric Forth, straight folk? Should the House of Lords allow this law to come into force, then gay men (and we assume, though the verdict of history is out on this one, gay women too) will be able, legally, to have sex in the hitherto prohibited zone of a ‘public convenience’ (to slip into the serviettesque language of the Telegraph). They’ll, physically, be able to do this because, as the law will still stand, they’ll be in the loo together. For straights, however, so such luxury will be afforded, as the government has given no sign that it intends to relax the nation-wide gender specification of public loos. In other words, the ability of a man and a woman to enjoy the God-given advantages of complementarity, whilst benefiting all the while from the pungent aroma of bleach cakes, and what have you, in the background, will be severely limited. Who’s going to speak up against this discrimination?
Still sorrowful, but now slightly angry
Isn’t it time for Olive to give it a rest? It was one thing to see Mr Letwin nodding like a toy dog whilst the party leader outlined the ‘all foreigners to be sent to prison hulks, then interrogated by the secret police’ stuff, but it’s getting to be a bit of a pain when he starts mumbling about the perhaps, possibly, provisional nature of this scheme. If you’re going to run with the intolerant dogs, you’re really going to have to face up to parting company with your cuddly friends the hares. Either Oliver Letwin, shamefully, subscribes to the foul nonsense advocated by Mr Duncan Smith in relation to asylum seekers, in which case, his own pretensions to decency have taken a pretty severe knock, or, he’s a cavilling politician, going along with something incontrovertibly dubious. Neither option does much for his dwindling band of admirers.
And the nightmare scenario is ...
For many in the Tory party, for far, far too many, the news that only 4 percentage points separate the government from the official opposition will come as a depressing statistic indeed. The more cynical among them will draw comfort from the fact that this figures come from the outfit known to the lobby as ‘AnyResultYouWantGuv’ — and others will cluster round the dismal truth that though the government’s ratings have plummeted, we’re still stuck on that just above 30% perch we’ve clinging to for more than a decade now. Still, I’ll make this prediction: the modernisers determined to oust Mr Duncan Smith will no more pay heed to positive opinion polls than Labour modernisers posthumously admired those garnered by the late John Smith as leader of the opposition. Their project bears very little relationship to winning elections (next to none in fact), and is more therapy-as-politics. Let’s hope that Mr Duncan Smith long continues his noble work of thwarting the designs of the Portilloites.
Kit Kildare, January 31, 2003 08:46 AM