Posted by Jim on November 28, 2018
The UK is not a ‘nation’, despite what Theresa May says
Brian Feeney. Irish News. Belfast. Wednesday, November 28, 2018
At first sight Theresa May’s so-called ‘letter to the nation’ pleading for support for her deal is just another typically provocative and divisive use of the terminology she always chooses to describe the UK which qualifies as a nation under no definition of the word.
However, it’s more than that. Her use of the word ‘nation’ betrays her ugly, nasty, nativist view of the place she lives in, a place now unlike her English idyll.
The UK isn’t a nation, it’s a state. The word state correctly describes the political unit that is the UK which has sovereignty over its territory and the people living there. It’s not a country either. England is a country, so is Scotland and Wales, distinct national entities in political geography. Those three are also nations, composed of people who mainly share a feeling of common national unity, identity or ethnicity, or all three.
As you see, the one that doesn’t fit is the north, an artificial construct, a political invention which is a region of the UK, but not part of Great Britain. Nor is it a nation for it meets no definition of the word, though the BBC thinks it is because the corporation is too lazy to think of a more precise definition or qualification. Loyalists think the north is a country because it’s an area given to their ancestors 97 years ago which they designated as their country, or colloquially, ‘our wee country’.
There’s another difference about the north. It’s the only part of the UK state which is entitled by law to secede from the UK when a simple majority votes to do so. Now the north has the additional attraction that the vote to secede automatically creates a parachute to float back into the EU. How long do you think it will take to sew the parachute? Five years? Ten? Or less, given that the backstop means the north remains in effect in the EU?
Not everyone knows the north’s peculiar position, especially British politicians. One egregious example is Shailish Vara who resigned as a junior minister here a fortnight ago in opposition to Theresa May’s Brexit policy. Vara said it was important that the north retained its place in Great Britain. Hah.
And there you see the nonsense of this place. A person you never heard of, resigned from a job you didn’t know he had, and he had the nerve to take decisions about a place where he had not a single vote and didn’t even know its status. Sounds a bit like the colossus of intellect that is our present proconsul [ Northern Ireland Secretary of State]
Now, back to Theresa May, who presides over this place [Northern Ireland] for the time being. May doesn’t like immigration. In fact, she has knocked her brains out for eight years to try to stop it. She it was who was responsible for the infamous ‘hostile environment’ policy which made the lives of people from the West Indies a misery. It was on her watch that the vans with appalling notice boards saying ‘Go home or face arrest’ toured London streets.
May, the nativist, sees England, and only England, as her country, her nation. In none of her speeches has she ever acknowledged the existence of either Scottish or Irish nationalists trapped for the present in the UK state. She conflates England, Britain and the UK interchangeably. Occasionally her true feeling blurts out as when she said in an attack on Remainers, ‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.’
Her hostility to immigrants is the main driving force and USP [abbreviation of “unique selling point”] behind her Brexit deal. She insisted on leaving the single market and customs union for that reason, and that’s the reason for the backstop. You can’t stop freedom of movement and stay in the single market. May could have kept the whole UK in the customs union and single market by any other name or subterfuge, but the price of ending free movement was to lose The North to the single market.
Obviously, given her nativism, her atavistic Englishness, her antipathy to immigration, she opted to jettison freedom of movement. Keep single market rules for the UK or keep The North? No brainer.
Posted by Jim on
Derry republican Tony Taylor, released as his internment by the British
approached a significant one thousand days, was released this evening
after a day of tense last-minute negotiations around the details of his
release.
Restrictions placed on the lifelong republican political activist
include a broad media censorship, as well as a threat of re-imprisonment
if the British government believe he has breached his release ‘licence’,
the details of which have not been released.
Speaking in a video clip uploaded to social media from their family home
in Derry, Mr Taylor’s wife Lorraine, said: “I’m delighted to have Tony
home. Thank God my nightmare is finally over. I’d just like to thank the
people in Derry for their faith, for all their campaigning for Tony and
for all their support through the two and a half years.
“It’s been a long process but I’m glad now they’ve made the decision to
let him home. An early Christmas present for us all.”
Speaking off camera, Mr Taylor said he was delighted to be reunited with
his family.
“Due to strict conditions on myself I have to be very careful what I
say, I can’t really talk about my internment or anything around that at
all,” he said.
“It’s great to be home again. It’s great to be here with my mother and
father, I’m delighted to be back with them and I know that they’ve
missed me a lot. They are up in age, I’ve always been there for them and
I want to continue to do that.
“Between them and my own family, I’m sure I’ll be kept right and busy,
my mother’s already got jobs for me and I’m only out a couple of hours.
We’re all back together again and that’s the main thing.”
Posted by Jim on
Posted by Jim on November 27, 2018
Official Communication from the UFA
Wednesday, November 28, 2018
2:00 PM – 4:00 PM and 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Vernon Wagner Funeral Home
Thursday, November 29, 2018
Vernon Wagner Funeral Home
All Off-Duty Members should attend in Class A Uniform.
Posted by Jim on
“ This article is of interest for two reasons:(1) Its author, Alex Kane, is a self-described Unionist; and, (2), many would regard the News Letter as a hardline Loyalist/Unionist/‘staunchly Protestant’ newspaper.
It is significant that such an attack on Arlene Foster would appear at this time.”—Fr. Sean McManus
Foster’s leadership career hangs by a thread
Alex Kane. News Letter. Belfast. Monday, 26 November 2018
I’ve always thought that Boris Johnson likes to imagine himself as some sort of much-loved national treasure: Winnie the Pooh, perhaps. Sadly, he lacks Pooh’s belief in old-fashioned loyalty; his ability to follow through on a plan (albeit with the help of a motley crew of rag-tag supporters); and the devastating socio/philosophical insights which make Pooh worth listening to all these years later.
So it was no particular surprise that Boris’s performance (and it’s always a performance, of course) at the DUP’s conference was less Winnie and more wind and knowing winks. At one of the most important moments for ‘Ulster’ unionism since the Third Home Rule Crisis, a moment when we might have expected some considered reflection and historical overview (he is an enthusiastic and talented historian), Boris gave us Star Wars lightsabers, bendy buses, a joke about the Titanic and another reference to bendy buses in Malta jack-knifing and catching fire.
The rest was a rehash and reheating of points he has been making for the past 18 months. He was a distraction on Saturday and the audience clearly enjoyed the distraction. But I’m not sure how much help he can be to them. He hasn’t been able to unseat Theresa May. He was unable to swing a majority of his cabinet colleagues round to his way of thinking. He and his friends in the European Reform Group (of which Jacob Rees-Mogg is the leading spokesman) have failed to gather a majority of Conservative MPs around their own alternative to the prime minister’s strategy. After weeks of claiming that they were on the cusp of forcing a vote of confidence in Mrs. May (and Johnson used his Daily Telegraph column and other platforms to pummel her relentlessly and mercilessly) they finally had to admit that they were ‘considerably short’ of the 48 letters they required.
What he didn’t do—and the DUP will have been grateful he didn’t—was say anything interesting enough or controversial enough to overshadow what Arlene Foster said in her speech. Hers, of course, was always going to be a difficult speech. There’s still no Assembly. The party feels betrayed by May. RHI has been an embarrassing nightmare (with the worst, the final report, still to come). The party has also been discomfited by what an MLA described to me as, ‘a few other personal problems which were mightily enjoyed by the media and our enemies in the past year’. All of which explains why she was neither bullish nor belligerent.
There were no attacks on the UUP. There were no attacks on Sinn Fein: indeed she stressed the need for the “full involvement of all parties capable of holding ministerial office, and want their contribution considered and acted upon, on its merits”. She addressed, without actually mentioning it, the breakdown of talks last February over the Irish language: “We must be conscious that there is a lack of cultural security primarily for Unionists, but also for others. We need a new Cultural Deal for everyone in Northern Ireland that respects difference and fosters understanding.” That phrase, Cultural Deal, is likely to become one of the key phrases in any new talks process (due to start again in January), so let’s hope the DUP leadership prepares its grassroots better than it did a year ago. Alex Kane Alex Kane Much was made of Foster’s supposed mea culpa: “Today as leader of the party I apologise. As a party we are, deeply, deeply sorry for the mistakes we made, and for the things we got wrong during that period. I know I speak for many when I say that over the course of the last twelve months there have been a number of other areas where behaviour in our ranks has not matched the standards expected of people holding public office.”
At the end of her speech two MLAs asked me the same question: “Has she done enough to save her job?” They asked the question because they know, as does she, that there are growing numbers who wouldn’t lift a finger to help, or raise a voice to persuade her otherwise, if she was to suggest standing aside. They will know, as does she, that the structures for a coup are already in place.
So, to answer their question. What she said wasn’t, in fact, a mea culpa; which is a formal, public acknowledgment of personal fault or error. She was apologising on behalf of the party. She was not apologising to the party. She was not apologising to the people of Northern Ireland. She was not apologising for her own role. She was not apologising in her personal capacity as leader. She spoke too much of ‘we’ and ‘our’ when what was really required was ‘me’ and ‘I’.
It reminded me too much of a line during her RHI evidence, when, speaking of a former special adviser, she said she was ‘accountable’ for him, but not ‘responsible’ for him. Her leadership career hangs by a thread. She will not survive if the final Brexit deal goes belly-up for the DUP. She will not survive the breakdown of yet another talks process; not least because growing numbers of her MLA colleagues want the Assembly up and running before an election becomes unavoidable. She will not survive a ‘bad’ RHI report. She will not survive bad council elections, due in a few months’ time. The fact that there was so little of substance in her speech; so little bite; so little fight; and so little good news to report is an indication of just how weak she is. She will have noted, and a few people mentioned it to me, that the applause for Nigel Dodds was both louder and more genuine. I’ve mentioned before that she and Mrs. May are in almost identical positions when it comes to holding onto their jobs. They both need everything to go right. In the next few weeks (although Foster has more wriggle-room re time) almost anything could go fatally wrong for them. It’s not a good position for any leader to find themselves; particularly at a key moment in UK history and in the history of their own parties.
