Every July Twelfth is 1969 in Northern Ireland

Every summer in Northern Ireland is the marching season when the three main Protestant marching orders (the Orange Order, the Apprentice Boys, the Royal Black Institution) hold parades  to commemorate important events from the past. The most important of those three orders by far is the Orange Order (every Northern Ireland premier between 1922 and 1972 was a member) and the most important parade is held annually on July 12th to commemorate King William of Orange's victory over the forces of King James II in the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 that guaranteed Protestantism in the United Kingdom and also kept Catholicism as a minority religion. The Orange Order was founded in 1795 to fight the Defenders, a Catholic organization, for control of areas in Ulster. What happens on the Twelfth is a good barometer of the atmospherics in the peace process and ethnic relations in the province.

Playing the Blue Card

Long before the term "playing the China card" was coined there was "playing the Orange card." The term was invented in 1886 when Secretary of the Exchequer (treasury secretary) Randolph Churchill, the father of Winston, went to Ulster Hall in Belfast and made an anti-Home Rule speech. Home Rule was the proposal to grant political autonomy to all of Ireland proposed in a bill by Liberal Party leader and Prime Minister Gladstone with the support of the Irish Parliamentary Party. The pro-British Protestant unionists in Ulster were entirely opposed to what they dubbed Rome Rule i.e. the Catholics would take orders from Rome. Churchill ended his speech to tremendous applause with the line "Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right!" It was called the Orange card as orange was the Protestant color in honor of King William of Orange the victor of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 over King James II. "King Billy's" victory kept Ireland Protestant and British.

This ended up as the start of a relationship between the Ulster Unionists and the Conservatives that lasted for over a century. It stymied attempts by Liberal politicians to reach a political solution to the Irish question. After the Home Rule Bill was defeated in the House of Commons in 1886, it was reintroduced by Gladstone in his final government in the 1890s and defeated in the House of Lords. In 1911 the Liberal Party finally passed a bill that allowed the Lords to only hold up legislation for three years rather than vetoing it permanently. Home Rule was set to be introduced in Ireland in 1914, sparking a mutiny by Anglo-Irish and Scots-Irish officers at Curragh Barracks in the summer of 1914. The officers refused to be used to put down armed resistance by Protestants to the imposition of home rule in Ireland. The Conservatives supported the mutineers.

The Irish question was then put on hold for four years by the outbreak of World War I. The attempt to introduce conscription in Ireland resulted in a massive alienation of the Irish population and the question was eventually solved in December 1921 by Britain granting commonwealth status to Ireland after a low-casualty guerrilla war that lasted for two-and-a-half years. The government granting this was a coalition government made up of both Liberals and Conservatives.

The last Conservative politician to attempt to play the Orange card was Enoch Powell, the politician opposed to immigration to Britain from the British Commonwealth. He was forced to leave the Conservatives and join the Ulster Unionist Party as an MP for South Down in order to back the unionists.

When it came to Middle East diplomacy it used to be the Republican Party that was the grown-up party that supported compromise and negotiation while the Democrats pandered to Israel. This began to change under Reagan and really changed under Bush Jr. Now Sarah Palin has played the Blue card by calling Obama's anti-settlement efforts "interference in an internal Israeli zoning dispute." As if an international border were merely a zone boundary!  The Tea Party has imitated the Conservatives in adopting the Blue card (or blue and white card) as the way to both oppose the national interest and win elections.  Palin the patriot. Palin the Kremlinologist and foreign policy expert.