A new unionist party in Northern Ireland?

There have been very interesting developments in Northern Ireland in the last week. The Ulster Unionists decided to go ahead with a joint candidate for the mid-Ulster parliamentary seat that Martin McGuinness is resigning from. They have chosen a candidate,  Nigel Lutton, who is the son of a man whom the Sinn Fein candidate allegedly helped to murder years ago. Judging from the results in the 2010 election when the Sinn Fein polled twice as many votes as all the unionist candidates combined, the seat is unwinnable by a unionist candidate.  This decision by Mike Nesbitt led both former Deputy Leader John McCallister and MLA Basil McCrea to resign from the party. There is now speculation that the two intend to form a new liberal unionist party.

David McNarry's Exodus

Former Ulster Unionist MLA for Strongford David McNarry announced yesterday that he was "bringing national politics to Northern Ireland" by joining the fringe United Kingdom Independence Party. The UKIP is known for opposition to Britain's membership in the European Union and is opposed to Britain's open immigration policy. It has seats mostly at the local council level on the British mainland. UKIP claims to be the only British party to openly contest seats in Northern Ireland. Most parties in Northern Ireland are unique to that province and are not organized in either Britain or the Republic of Ireland, the notable exception being Sinn Fein. Although many have links to British parties and attend their party conferences and vise versa. 

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.