Calling all Right wingers – the North needs you urgently! There is a real gap in the market for a sensible Right-wing movement now that everyone seems to want to be politically correct, trendy liberals.
Robbo's DUP is now even more liberal towards nationalists than former
Northern Prime Minister Terence O'Neill's Unionist Party.
Gone forever are the days of snowballing a visiting Taoiseach, expelling
members who darkened the grey skies of the Republic, and there are certainly no
more Clontibret invasions or loyalist band parades with red berets.
If the election battered Ulster Unionists limp back into the Assembly with
only a dozen MLAs in May, expect current boss Tom Elliott to be deposed by
liberal Unionist champion Basil McCrea.
Even the supposed hardline Traditional Unionist Voice fronted by ex-DUP MEP
wee Jimmy Allister is making sounds that it will work the Assembly ... if it
wins a seat or two.
Slowly, but surely, Stormont is reverting to the old liberal
Unionist/moderate republican government it once was before it was axed by then
Tory PM Ted Heath in 1972.
At some point, a new Right-wing force will emerge in Northern politics – and
I'm not talking about the binheads in the National Front or BNP.
Robbo looks like surviving Irisgate and retaining his East Belfast Assembly
seat. He's even talking about circumstances where he would attend a Catholic
service.
DUP-loving Bible thumpers see the fall of the Celtic Tiger and the Catholic
Church's dilemmas over child-abusing pervert priests as God's judgement on the
Republic.
Prod fundamentalists now see the South as ripe for the religious plucking.
Now the talk is of religious revivals – of the need to reach out the hand of
Christian fellowship to Southern brethren and sisters.
The late former South Down MP Enoch Powell – noted for his notorious 'rivers
of blood' speech when he was a Tory – once branded the DUP as the Protestant
Sinn Féin.
But the Shinner/DUP Stormont Executive is the best example of what executed
republican icon James Connolly dreamt of when he wanted to see the Orange and
Green unite under the banner of socialism.
Now that the old firebrand rhetoric of the Paisleyite DUP has gone, the party
gets more like a Protestant version of Sinn Féin every day.
On economic Northern policy, there is little difference between Robbo's new
look DUP and Marty McGuinness's moderate Shinner movement.
But a Right-wing giant lies sleeping – working class and middle class
loyalism. Political Unionism, in its bid to become trendy liberals, has
abandoned loyalism.
The stereotype of the modern loyalist is the drunken, jobless, drug-dealing
working class yob who has failed his Eleven Plus exam.
But the vast majority of Northern loyalists are not the Jim 'Doris Day' Gray
or Ihab Shoukri career criminals.
Real loyalists feel unwanted and unneeded. The success of the old Northern
Ireland Forum for Political Dialogue was that it brought loyalist groups in from the cold.
Now the North is rapidly becoming a cold house for loyalism. Some urban
Protestant communities have been ripped apart by loyalist feuding. Many
loyalists are saying: 'enough is enough and we want our voice heard'.
Indeed, some loyalists are even voting for Sinn Féin, such is their
frustration at being snubbed by the traditional Unionist parties.
While there is no stomach within mainstream loyalism for any return to
violence, there is the real danger that some fringe loyalists may attempt
something to make a point, not with nationalists, but with Unionist parties who
view loyalists as second class Protestants.
