You may not agree with Peter Robinson’s brilliant characterisation of Jim Allister as the unionist equivalent of Hiroo Onoda, the last Japanese soldier still fighting a war that ended 30 years before.
Nevertheless, you have to agree that Allister is simply the most extreme, and extreme is the word, version of a unionist syndrome, a belief that the future can be, should be, the same as the past.
The most obvious manifestation of that syndrome is the constant repetition of the demand for ‘unionist unity’. For what it was worth, unionist unity in elections hasn’t existed since 1969 when the arch-bigot Paisley fractured it. We know it will never come to pass.
Fair enough, but the thinking behind the demand is inherently flawed because it harks back to the past and the nostalgia for the days when there was a cast-iron unionist majority, when there was one, maybe two nationalist seats at Westminster, when there was an overwhelming unionist majority at Stormont.
Why can no unionist leader come to terms with the reality of accelerating demographic change and face up to the fact that even if there were unionist unity, the days of unionist majority are gone forever?
Even after the last British general election in July, the taciturn new DUP leader, who’s not stupid, in one of his rare statements decried the splits in unionism.
Why did he fly in the face of the facts? He must have seen what happened in Fermanagh & South Tyrone, where Sinn Féin’s Pat Cullen transformed the 2019 Sinn Féin majority of 57 into 4,571. There was unionist unity but the candidate was stuffed. So much for unionist unity.
Again, could he not see the writing is on the wall in East Derry, where Gregory Campbell scraped in with a majority under 300?
However, a touching belief in the possibility of recreating the electoral past is only the most obvious example of the unionist syndrome.
Why do unionist leaders reject the overwhelming votes of their parliament in Westminster in their demand to turn the clock back? The most recent example is the impossible demand, shared by the current DUP leader, in futile talks with the British government alongside Jeffrey Donaldson and Emma Little-Pengelly, to ditch the Windsor Framework. The Windsor Framework was passed in Westminster by 515-29.
What was the DUP offer? Nothing. Just go back to the past, yet they didn’t accept the status quo ante either.
It was exactly the same with the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985. Unionists refused to accept it, despite it being passed 473-47. Unionists boycotted everything for years afterwards, absurdly demanding the British renege on the agreement. For what? To go back to the position beforehand. Was that ideal?
Sadly, the unionist syndrome isn’t confined only to what they call ‘constitutional matters’. It extends into educational and social beliefs.
Witness Paul Givan’s recent grotesque criteria for allocating funds to raise standards in disadvantaged schools. The outcome means that two-thirds of grammar schools and, strangely, a prep school in his constituency benefit.
Why do the DUP cling to the belief that in the past, selection provided what they persist in calling a ‘world class education system’? Why do they, when all research shows selection is the chief obstacle to progress for children from working-class families?
All research also shows that the DUP’s insistence on selection contributes to making the north’s education outcomes the worst in these islands, that it inhibits productivity here and produces three times more early leavers with no qualifications than in the south.
Why does the the DUP fly in the face of the facts and experience and insist on this when some of those worst affected by their antediluvial ideology are males from the districts which vote DUP?
Do unionist politicians have in their minds some ideal year that they’d like to return to, say 1954 or 1966, before Gerry Fitt got elected, when God was in heaven, there was Sunday observance and people knew their place?
Surely there must be some spot in the past when they’d like to have been born, since they reject the future?
Normally politicians offer their voters some shimmering Shangri-la, sunny uplands in a bright future.
For unionists, especially the DUP, the offer is back to the future.
Could that be perhaps why many unionists don’t bother to vote at all?