Alex Kane is such a nice, mild-mannered man, it’s easy to forget he’s a unionist. He has long held the view that unionists should speak up about the benefits of the union with Britain, and today in The Irish Times he wonders aloud what unionists would or should talk about if they held a weekend convention, as nationalists did recently in Dublin’s 3 Arena.
And boy, does Kane give the unionists a long list of questions they should face. Here’s just five.
- Can unionists dismiss possibility of a border poll “in next decade or so”?
- `How do they conduct an accurate survey of support for the union with Britain?
- What beliefs/values underlie support for continued link with Britain?
- What do they need to do to maximise support for the union with Britain?
- Can a ‘standing forum’ be established into which all unionists can feed and from which agreement on message and strategy might emerge?
There are a lot of other questions, but let’s look at these:
Q: Can unionists close their eyes to a possible border poll in a decade’s time? Answer: they can and they will. Many unionists are so convinced by their own propaganda, when they say the union is safe, short of a brain transplant it’s hard to imagine big change there.
Q: How do they establish the degree of support for the union? Answer: this used to be easy – if you were Protestant or Protestant in background, you supported the union. It’s trickier now. Because now you can almost hear the shuffling of unionist feet towards how a reunited Ireland might look.
Q: What values underlie support for the union? Answer: Kind of tricky. The backwoodsmen and women have always found their values in triumphalism. You knew who you were because thanks be to God you weren’t one of those who engaged in idolatrous worship of Mary and who could never be relied on, so don’t have one about the place. There are those who define themselves by the difference between them and a despised opposition. You’ve probably alienated a lot of those, Alex, by even asking the question.
Q: How do they maximise unionist/pro-union votes at election time? Answer: in the old days by gerrymander. That’s not so easy these days. The truth is, if you think your side of the argument is on the up, there is a momentum. If you think your side of the argument is wobbling or collapsing, you’re more likely to sigh or snarl and stay at home to watch the Great British Bake-off.
Unionist unity has always been the Holy Grail, the electoral nirvana. But with more and more ‘soft’ unionists shifting into the Alliance Party, and a lot more wondering what this united Ireland thing would mean for their lives and the lives of their families, unionism may find that, even before a border poll (in five-to-ten years time), a lot of unionists will have the obvious advantages of escaping from the political madhouse run by a prime minister who’s managed to send the pound into free-fall and has left many British citizens facing into a winter where they’ll curse the people who did this to them and the state in which they are trapped.
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