After The UUP

Beyond the fact that whichever of it and the DUP happens not to be providing the First Minister at the given time is always that little bit more Agreement-sceptical, there really is no remaining point to it if, as was effectively decided today, it is not going to be "going into Opposition". The root of the problem with the setup in Northern Ireland is that there is no such thing as Opposition with designated benches, time for debates, representation on committees, and so forth. Everyone is supposed to be in Government all the time. In which case, who is asking any questions? Ah, there's the rub.

Even by the standards of these things, the UUP is a loose federation of local franchisees: liberal-Left (or, these days, liberal-Right) intellectuals, industrial-municipal machinists, agricultural-municipal machinists, Monday Clubbers, and so on. By all accounts, the Monday Clubbers, in particular, are regrouping, being no longer necessarily anti-Agreement, but having other concerns these days. Has anyone bothered to check whether Brendan McConville is no longer a member of Sinn Féin? And no party is able, or apparently even willing, to stop Sinn Féin from trial-running its desired banishment of the Catholic Church from the schools throughout Ireland by banishing Northern Ireland's Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist clergy from their role in the schools that, after all, they set up.

For what are the Church of Ireland, the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and the Methodist Church in Ireland to the DUP? As little as mainstream Irish Catholic culture is to Sinn Féin, so is mainstream Ulster Protestant culture to the DUP. The Orange Order's ban on Free Presbyterian ministers as Chaplains may have been lifted, or it may now be widely ignored. Like, lest Paisleyites gloat, the ban on alcohol in Orange Halls, and the ban of attendance at Catholic weddings and funerals because the Mass is celebrated. But it certainly used to be in place and in effect, well into the recent past. Yet the UUP can now produce only two Leadership candidates who can see no difference between Paisleyism and the three historically mainstream Protestant bodies, and would no more wish to preserve their civic role than extend its.

And then there is the fact that the authoritative Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey now shows over half of Catholics to be pro-Union, with only one third in favour of a United Ireland, although that is still a vastly higher proportion than would vote for it in the Republic, where the issue simply no longer exists as a mainstream political concern. Yet who is taking account of these realities? Catholicism, and with it the broadly leftish socio-economic concerns of the Catholic community, is even more objectionable to the UUP's runners and riders than either fundamentalist or traditional Protestantism. Once, they would have been One Nation Tories who duly resisted attempts to drag the United Kingdom into wars of liberal intervention. But no more. Is this the first British party to have only neoliberal neoconservatives in it? Though not the first on the island of Ireland. And where are the Progressive Democrats now?

The carve-up between two lunatic fringes stops bombs from going off in England. Though not in Northern Ireland. But who asked them?