Empathy with unionism: a scary experience

Not many people do empathy. I mean the Full Empathy, where you put yourself as completely as possible in the skull of someone else and try to see the world from their point of view.

I’ve been driven to this notion of empathy recently by the small matter of James Brokenshire,  British Secretary of State to our NE Nest (NEN).  To say, as Brian Feeney did last Sunday, that Mr Brokenshire doesn’t have a mandate here is like saying Nelson McCausland doesn’t shave every day. But Ulster Unionist Doug Beattie has claimed that Mr Brokenshire does have a mandate, since he was elected by a constituency in the UK and he’s here representing the government of the UK.

It’s similar to the Brexit debate. The SDLP and Sinn Féin (and others) would argue that our NEN  clearly rejected Brexit, so  we shouldn’t be pulled unwillingly out of the EU. The DUP in contrast would argue that the Brexit vote was a UK-wide one, so we must accept what the majority of UK people say they want – to wit, Brexit.

My instinct is to side with  Feeney regarding Brokenshire and with the SDLP/Sinn Féin in terms of the Brexit vote; but if I’m exercising proper empathy I must try to understand the perspective of others and why they have that perspective.

In both the cases cited – Brexit and Brokenshire – the DUP/UUP position is understandable. The vote was a UK-wide vote, and Brokenshire was elected by the people of  Old Bexley and Sidcup.   To bridge the gap between Old Bexley and Sidcup, and our NEN is a difficult engineering feat. But if you accept  – and hold dear – the notion of the UK, then Brokenshire has every right to be here as British Secretary of State.

Likewise if you accept and hold dear the notion of the UK,  the irrelevance of our majority vote in NEN follows naturally.

OK, commitment to the Union with Britain  is behind unionist thinking in both case. But why does the link to Britain matter so much to unionists that it appears to feature in every major position they take?

You might say, as David Trimble has, that they enjoy being part of “a multi-cultural, multi-national and multi-ethnic state rather than a larger bit of what has remained, until very recently, an unattractive catholic/nationalist monolith.”  To paraphrase the good Lord’s words,  it’s nicer being part of an outward-looking,  liberal democracy rather than part of an inward-looking, parochial state.

The thing is, the good Lord wrote that distinction between the two states in 2000.  And even then, regarding the south of Ireland, you’ll notice his face-saving “until very recently.” Would anyone today say that the south is a “catholic monolith”? Uh-uh.  And if you read Fine Gael big beast Leo Varadkar about the perils of a border referendum, you’ll know that the south is hardly a nationalist monolith either.

As for the UK – multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-national – well yes, it’s still all those things. But in recent years there’s been a sharp change in British attitudes to such things. They’re less keen on the multi-national thing: their exit from the EU attests to that. They’re less keen on the multi-ethnic thing, since immigration was the biggest factor in producing Brexit. Multi-cultural? Mmm. I’ve spoken to taxi-drivers in Britain about multi-culturalism in Britain, and they seem to be unanimous that anyone coming to England should speak English, dress like English people, eat English food and…well, dammit, become English.

So there we have it. I’ve had a stab at empathy by getting inside the thinking of unionists, and it seems their commitment to unionism, employed in deciding their position in numerous matters, is based on an out-of-date notion, not just about the south of Ireland, but about  Britain itself.

One thing I know after my empathetic venture: being  a unionist these days means avoiding that disgusting, blasphemous, apocalyptic five-letter word, Change.