LOYALISTS MUST FORM A CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT FOCUSSING ON PASSIVE RESISTANCE.
Former Blanket columnist and Radical Unionist commentator, Dr John Coulter, in his latest chapter on the ideology of New Loyalism, which is being featured exclusively on Long Kesh Inside Out, urges the PUL community to play the republicans at their own game, and form a PUL Civil Rights Movement.
The Protestant Unionist Loyalist (PUL) community needs to take assassinated American icon Dr Martin Luther King as its political guiding star and formally launch a PUL civil rights movement.
There can be no doubting the civil rights movement worked for the nationalist community, until the entire cause was hijacked by the Provisional republican movement.
While republicans will claim Bloody Sunday in January 1972 was the straw which broke the Stormont back, leading to Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath axing the original Northern Ireland Parliament a few months later.
Had the civil rights movement not been overshadowed by the IRA campaign of terror, many in the PUL community, especially the working class, would have ultimately benefited from the then Stormont Prime Minister Terence O’Neill’s reforms.
O’Neill’s only mistake was that his reform programme in the late Sixties progressed too slowly for nationalists, and the hardline of his Unionist Party used the emerging Paisleyite movement to topple the liberal O’Neill and his co-reformers in the Ulster Unionist Party.
While many in working class loyalism view Paisleyism with distain because of the number of young Protestants who ended up in jail or an early grave because they reacted to the Hell fire sermons of the then fundamentalist driven Protestant Unionist movement, it should not be forgotten how Ian Paisley senior rose to power within the PUL community, particularly after 1971 when the DUP was formally launched.
Nationalists have been experts at presenting the image of the poverty-stricken Catholics discriminated against by the Orange Order-dominated Northern Ireland. But republicans, and indeed many in the upper classes of the Unionist community, have been very quick to air-brush the plight of working class Protestants out of the history of Northern Ireland.
As someone who grew up in Bannside and North Antrim where Paisleyism was born and blossomed politically, I saw at first hand the challenges which many working class Protestants – particularly in large rural village housing estates – had to contend with on a daily basis.
Even in the late Sixties, many Protestant working class homes did not enjoy the luxury of an inside flushing toilet. The daily slop bucket run to the bottom of a field was still the order of the day. Catholics may have been good at airing their gripes using the civil rights movement and communist-dominated People’s Democracy party.
For generations since the formation of Northern Ireland in the 1920s, the working class Protestant community had relied on the empty rhetoric of the upper class-dominated Ulster Unionist Party.
If the Protestant natives became restless about their living conditions, the Unionist aristocrats could always scare the pants of the working class PUL community by using the Orange Order to warn about yet another republican threat to drive Northern Ireland into the Rome rule of a united Ireland.
Religiously, Unionism was dominated for generations by liberal Protestants who paid strict lip service to the principles of the Orange Order in terms of their opposition to Rome, but not the Salvationist position of born-again Christianity. Such evangelicals and fundamentalists were very much in the minority regarding influence in both the Orange Order and Unionist Party.
While Ian Paisley senior was a rapidly emerging name in the Ulster Bible Belt since he launched his staunchly fundamentalist Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster in 1951, it was not until the late Sixties that he successfully managed to covert his fundamentalism into political Salvationism.
Paisleyism’s success was that it created a seemingly unholy alliance of two elements within the PUL community who until the late 1960s had been largely voiceless sections of the Unionist Party – evangelical Christians and working class Protestants.
Unionism’s aristocratic, Big House and upper middle class farming families ran both the party and the Orange Order. In spite of everyone calling themselves ‘brothers’ in the Orange lodge room, the Order was mainly a vehicle of communication between the various classes in Unionism.
It was a means by which the Unionist aristocracy could pass its views on who to select and vote for to the working class voters. Membership of the Unionist Party was almost like Irish Freemasonry – by invitation only.
In spite of the Hell fire preaching, Paisley senior’s Unionism represented practical politics. In Bannside, the heartland of O’Neill, it would have been seen as “too common” for the Prime Minister to bother helping people with facilities such as inside loos. So Paisley senior championed the practical needs of working class Protestants and got them their much-needed inside toilets.
As for the born-again Christians, Paisley senior’s Protestant Unionist movement and then the DUP gave the evangelicals the courage to challenge the liberals for positions in the Loyal Orders, especially the Orange and Black institutions.
Hardline Right-wingers within the establishment Unionist Party used the Paisleyites as political cannon fodder to topple Unionism’s liberal reformers. The Unionist Right wing and the Paisley supporting factions could work hand in glove in this campaign.
Unionist Party meetings – like membership – in the late Sixties and early Seventies were by invitation only. A Paisleyite activist I interviewed for my academic research at Queen’s University told me how upper class Unionist Party members would give him their invitations so that he and his supporters could infiltrate Unionist Party meetings and make them ungovernable.
This was especially the case in Bannside and North Antrim where many Unionist Party meetings were held traditionally in the network of Orange halls which spanned the constituencies.
The Unionist establishment families, often dubbed the Fur Coat and No Knickers Brigade, could not cope with such heckling from the Paisley supporters. Such families were used with the working class Protestants doing as they were told.
For many of these aristocratic and upper middle class Unionist families, this was the first time since the 1920s that they had been verbally challenged by fellow Unionists. The reaction of these families to this political heckling was simple – they didn’t attend future meetings.
Gradually, the Unionist Party was drive out of many Orange halls in North Antrim and branches subsequently collapsed through lack of members. Two examples from my own memoirs of this period in Unionist politics in this constituency serve to illustrate this dilemma.
Clough was at that time an exclusively Protestant village in the depth of the Bannside constituency and was an overwhelmingly Unionist stronghold of North Antrim. My father, as the local Presbyterian minister, also held the post of honorary president of the village’s Unionist Party branch.
One of the local Presbyterian elders, regarded as a Big House farming Unionist, held a senior position in the branch. The branch met in the village Orange hall. My father received a call from the RUC that he was to go to the meeting to escort the elder from the hall as it was surrounded by Paisley supporters and there was the danger of severe crowd unrest.
In spite of my father being honorary president, he was still respected as a preacher of the evangelical Salvationist Gospel and he was able to physically escort the elder through the protesters to safety. But the implications of that incident for the local Unionist Party branch were overwhelming.
To avoid further confrontations, the members abandoned the Orange hall and began meeting in members’ homes outside the village. Eventually, the branch folded and it would not be until the early Eighties that the branch was regenerated sufficiently to the point where it could once again hold its meetings in a local Orange hall.
The second example took place during the 1970 General Election campaign for the North Antrim Westminster seat which was being defended by sitting Ulster Unionist MP Henry Clark, a typical example of the aristocratic Unionist Party. His main opponent was Ian Paisley senior, who was fresh from his Stormont Bannside by-election triumph.
The headquarters for the local Clough campaign had had to be moved out of the Orange hall, and was set up in Clough’s Presbyterian manse. Even as a primary school minister’s son, I was already a Unionist activist as my one and only role was to bring sandwiches to Clark and other senior members of the campaign team.
The Paisleyite supporters had mounted a successful campaign in the area to physically prevent the Unionist Party canvassing.
As I walked into the sitting room of Clough manse, I could smell the distinctive odour of cigarette smoke. I knocked and entered the room to see three men sitting at the table – my father, the late Rev John Brown, and Clark (who was smoking).
Dad and Rev Brown were trying to calm Clark down because he had been shocked by graffiti daubed on a gable wall in the village – ‘Shoot Clark.’ While he was a big name aristocratic MP, Clark had never faced such venom from fellow Protestants in his own heartland. Clark lost the election to Paisley, and with Ian Junior retaining the seat at the last Westminster election, it is unlikely North Antrim will ever be a Commons seat again.
The PUL community must influence the Unionist leadership to take on board their pastoral cares by embarking on a programme of well-organised passive resistance. Violence, strikes, or street protests are not the way forward.
The PUL community, especially its working class, must recognise the painful reality that, at the moment, given the apathy at the ballot box in the PUL community, that the Catholic middle class is now the dominant sector in Ulster politics.
The various sessions of the Unionist Forum have largely concluded that the Union is safe when talking about a border poll, but is the Union safe itself within the UK itself? In the provision of education and health, Sinn Fein has worked the political system effectively to gain much for the Catholic community.
Enoch Powell, the late and former South Down UUP and perhaps the greatest Prime Minister the UK never had, once branded the DUP as the Protestant Sinn Fein.
While he was at that time referring to how the DUP only wanted to do things on its terms, taken this phrase in its 2013 context, what is needed to deliver this passive resistance is a Protestant Sinn Fein movement for the PUL community.
In this respect, I want New Loyalism to adopt my Ten Commandants of passive resistance to take back Ulster for the British.
1, All shades of Unionism must ensure that every – and I mean EVERY – member of the PUL community eligible to vote is on the electoral roll.
2, That every registered voter agrees to actually vote.
3, That a Unionist Coalition be formed to decide on agreed candidates for all elections.
4, That the Christian Churches work closely with political parties and community organisations to identify the practical needs which the PUL community faces, for example, how to actually known what benefits can be claimed for, and how to complete the documentation.
5, To use the existing media for a charm offensive to get this pro-active PUL message across.
6, To work closely with the PSNI to defuse areas of tension.
7, To campaign to slash the red tape strangling the development of our health service and education sector.
8, If marches are to take place, we organise them as proper PUL civil rights marches.
9, We use the European Court of Human Rights as a weapon to ensure the Stormont Parliament abides by the decisions achieved by the PUL Civil Rights Movement.
10, To only vote for those politicians and parties which give their support to the PUL Civil Rights.
This campaign can be achieved. Sinn Fein has milked the peace process for the republican community, so the Unionist leadership has a moral obligation to ensure that a PUL community’s Civil Rights Movement campaign succeeds. Let the ghost of the Fur Coat Brigade which haunted the PUL community for generations be finally culled.
