William Ennis is a 34 year old Progressive Unionist Party activist–part time student living in East Belfast.
Fifty questions for big-house unionists.
- Is it still okay to ask constituents to pay for £300.00 pens via expense claims?
- Why aren’t the UUP and DUP one party? They are politically identical!
- Why do you want an economic United Ireland with your desire for a 10% corporate tax rate?
- Why do you want a United Ireland on the grounds of equal marriage?
- Why did you distribute 40,000 leaflets concerning the Belfast City Hall flag and then abandon those who wanted to protest regarding the same issue?
- Why don’t you make your position clear on the NHS? Do you want it sold off or saved?
- Why do you discriminate against homosexual Northern Irish men by denying them the right to give blood when those who live in England, Scotland and Wales can?
- Why do you support a system of academic selection at the age of eleven which so obviously fails the working class children of Northern Ireland (particularly ones of Protestant background)?
- Do you think it is okay for a business in administration to be given public sector contracts whilst others are keen for such work?
- Do you think those responsible for historic discrimination against Catholics in terms of housing and jobs should point out more often that it was not the fault of working class Protestants?
- Why the assumption that every Unionist is a right-wing Christian?
- Why the eagerness to rubber stamp welfare cuts at the assembly knowing it will induce poverty amongst a great many Northern Irish people?
- Why attempt to score political points over other Unionist parties on the grounds of their communication with paramilitary prisoners when both the UUP and DUP have fielded such people as candidates?
- Why don’t you support the Loyalist protest movement unless there it involves platform and cameras?
- Why don’t you speak out against racism more often?
- Why don’t you speak out against homophobia more often?
- Why don’t you speak out against the tax avoidance of multi-national companies?
- Do you support the Trident missile system? If you don’t, why not say so? If you do, justify it?
- Why, following big-house unionisms mass rally’s of the conflict era when young Protestant men and boys where fired up toward paramilitarism and ended up in prison, didn’t you support them and their families?
- Why do big house unionists tend to be anti-devolution right up to the point were the biggest office might be theirs?
- Why the assumption that every Unionist is heterosexual?
- Why the assumption that every Unionist is to the right of the political spectrum?
- How many of your positions are yours, as opposed to merely Sinn Fein’s in converse?
- Nationalists seem to score many political victories. To what degree is this the fault of elected Unionists?
- Why is it that only when only a Loyalist gains media popularity are you happy to refer to him/her as a “Unionist”?
- Why do DUP politicians scold other Unionist parties for “splitting the unionist vote” when the DUP invented the practice?
- Why so quiet on the issue of low incomes?
- Why so quiet on the issue of brown-field eyesore sights? Are you friends with their neglectful corporate owners?
- Do you support super-grass trials? If so, why, given their capacity for corruption? If not, why weren’t you more vocal when it was Catholics they were used to target?
- How does one go about acquiring a ransom strip of land for a fiver?
- Why do you place emphasis upon who is First Minister and who is Deputy First minister when the two roles are functionally and legally identical? Is it to cling on to a cheap protestant supremacist vote by implying a unionist being FM is some sort of victory? Wouldn’t it make more sense to address both offices as Co-First minister?
- Why have big house unionists not fought for full implementation of the Armed Forces Covenant with the same determination they had in sending young men and women to war in the first place?
- Do you think it is okay to say “the party comes first”?
- Why do you complain that there should be an opposition at Stormont when no-one is preventing your party/parties from simply withdrawing from government and forming one?
- Why do you want the number of Stormont MLA’s reduced on grounds of cost yet support an 11% pay rise for them?
- Why the reluctance to accept that the resolution to the conflict by sharing government was first explored in a document by Loyalist prisoners as far back as the 1970’s (it was called shared responsibility)?
- Why the default objection to the Irish language when the Queen herself clearly enjoys using it?
- When parties which claim to be “other” or “non-tribal” score political capital by mocking, belittling or scapegoating the Loyalist protest movement, why don’t you challenge them?
- If they oppose the Parades Commission on the grounds of its unaccountability due to it’s not being elected why do big house unionists accept peerages?
- How many factories have you brought to your area?
- Would you support a rise in the minimum wage?
- If you are Euro-sceptic why take a seat in the European parliament? Wouldn’t it make more of a statement to abstain and distribute the large salary among charity and community projects in your area?
- Why did you not support one man one vote in the 60’s?
- If a party which condemned paramilitarism used a paramilitary group to put up its election posters, would you consider this hypocritical?
- Why does big-house unionist MP’s often claim so many expenses? Even by Westminster standards…
- Why do you not encourage working class unionists to join trades unions?
- Name one industry you have saved?
- Do you think it should take a full protest movement to convince a big-house unionist party that the unionist people did not want the proposed development at the Maze?
- Why have there been so few social housing projects?
- Why are only Irish Nationalist parties in the assembly batting for the poor?
I only intended to write ten!
