Doomsday Blue?

50 years today since the start of the Ulster Workers' Council strike, the only strike in the history of the United Kingdom to have been purely political, with no industrial dispute at its root. It is therefore ignored for two reasons. First, in bringing down the power-sharing arrangements of the Sunningdale Agreement, it was fully successful. And secondly, the opponents of what they regard as political activity by trade unions tend, at least in Britain, to have a rather affected and exaggerated affinity with Ulster Unionists in general and with the most hardline of them in particular, although that is not the Unionist memory of Margaret Thatcher. Nothing about the UWC strike would make sense to most people. Did it at the time?

That is Northern Ireland for you. Never mind the Rwanda Plan. If the DUP really wanted to consolidate Evangelical Protestantism, then it would be organising planeloads from Africa. As would any formation that wanted to consolidate Catholicism, but none even professes to exist. On Saturday night, many of that lot will have availed themselves of their present constitutional status by voting for Bambie Thug.

Honestly, Ireland, we get it. You have changed. Now grow up and enter My Lovely Horse next year. Changed from what, anyway? Yeats and Synge put on record the Ireland the Catholic topcoat of which was very ancient, but was nevertheless that, a lick of paint on a profoundly pagan culture. Catholic Ireland as most people think of it did not begin to emerge until about 1870, or reach its fullest form, never complete, until 1890 or thereabouts. From then, it did not last 100 years. It never produced a Catholic intellectual of any international importance. There is no Irish Newman; in fact, he briefly spent the least successful period of his life there. All in awe of him, and therefore with a strong sense of England as a bastion of the Faith, priests from the Church's new heartlands of the Global South are often unaware that Ireland was ever considered anything special in Her life. Perhaps it never was?

But Saint Paul's elemental spirits, which are Saint John's fallen angels, are real, and they are what the human race worships in the absence of Abrahamic monotheism, not as worthy of worship, which they are not, but as deserving of fear, which to an extent they are. The startlingly similar accounts and depictions of demons on different sides of the world arise from different people's and different peoples' encounters with the same ones. They are always there, remaining prominent in Ireland, as anywhere, for many centuries until the Faith reached its zenith, and returning to the fore, as anywhere, now that it is in retreat.

Ireland's international contribution to theology has been to the Protestant variety, and most importantly at the moment in a recent and unlettered form called Dispensationalism. Popular in the United States but of Irish origin, that identifies the State of Israel as the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy. It wants all the Jews to move to Israel before they either converted or were killed as a prelude to the Second Coming. Yes, you did read that correctly. Either converted or killed. Every Jew in the world. It is just that they have to go to Israel for the purpose. No one thought any of this before the nineteenth century, and few Evangelical Protestants outside the United States do now, as the votes of several African countries bespeak at the United Nations. Yet look at its power.

In refusing to consider even the half-hearted American threat to restrict arms sales to Israel, both main parties in Britain are lining up with that sort of thing. But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

I have no plan to join the Workers Party of Britain, although nor would I expect to stand against it. But if it did not contest North Durham, then I would. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. But there does need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not. We have made a start.