Eurosceptics the new Ulster Unionists? Hardly.

I’m a little puzzled by a section of this blog, by Iain Martin, carried on the Wall Street Journal’s site. Martin (presumably the same one who writes for the Telegraph) hails the death of ‘British Euroskepticism’ (sic). It is this passage, however, which had me scratching my head,

“The defeat of British Euroskepticism reminds me quite a bit of what happened to Ulster Unionism around the turn of the century. One minute it seemed to be winning the arguments. It was strong, then the wind changed and it wasn’t - in any way that we had previously understood it - there any more. Its former adherents couldn’t quite see the point of carrying on as they had previously done and within months had “adjusted to reality”. Quickly, they were prepared to adopt positions they would have previously though unthinkable.”


Ulster Unionism ‘wasn’t there anymore’? Undoubtedly accommodations were reached which were disorientated many unionists, but unionism, devoted to retaining and strengthening the Union, certainly didn’t disappear. Neither had Ulster Unionism been strong prior to the mid-90s. On the contrary it had been ignored for years. I simply can’t see that Martin is comparing like with like.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retained a substantial haul of arms.
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro
Read more