Ulster Says Noah

By AM Sunday, August 5, 2012

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Nesbitt was chosen not because of his ideas (most of which passed over the heads of his supporters), but because he was reckoned to be the man to turn around the negative media perception of the party and land some hefty blows on the DUP – Alex Kane

Former UUP leader Tom Elliot defends imprisonment without trial so long as the agencies that provided disinformation for the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, also supply the intelligence upon which a British state decree of internment may be issued. Consistently antediluvian in outlook it appears he is an apple that dropped from the Harry West Bramley tree, losing none of the bitterness in the fall. That he eventually had to relinquish the reins of leadership within the UUP might have raised expectations in some quarters that Harry’s ghost had been sufficiently exorcised to the point that any Doppelgänger resembling the old Fermanagh Orangeman might just be the recipient of a persona non grata award in Glengall Street.

But only in some quarters. The ghost of Unionism Past is proving a tough nut to crack. Tuning in to the ideas of new leader Mike Nesbitt hardly engenders confidence that he will be much of an improvement on what he replaced. Okay, his attempt to sound progressive and secular on the issue of no state funding for faith schools might win him a few brownie points - even fewer blessings - but not many. Likewise with his decision to remove the party whip from that other escapee from the Ark, Ken Maginnis, who thinks in true biblical style that gay people are “unnatural and deviant.” Nor, even in the Left deficient Northern assembly, is there any chance of him emerging as flaming Red Mick from the Strangford Soviet because of an invite issued to a Marxist to address a UUP seminar on poverty.

Assuming the leadership from the hapless Elliot was the turning point at which Mike Nesbitt failed to turn. He forewent the opportunity to gust through the political Ark of which he had become captain. The flood of political violence and conflict had long since subsided. His main news presenter spot for UTV created an image of Nesbitt as someone able to see both sides. But he has squandered whatever vision he might have laid claim to in order to wear the black patch of one of the North’s one eyed tribes. Far from guiding his creaking vessel to terra firma for essential maintenance he has taken to the high seas under the colours of the Jolly Rodger. A political plundering he shall go.

The type of piracy being advocated by those he captains is hardly hidden as they continue to wave their cutlasses at nationalists.  Antrim UUP councillor Adrian Cochrane Watson promised pigs would fly before Antrim Council would see a Sinn Fein mayor returned. Cookstown UUP councillor Robert Kelly’s less than novel approach to the past is that the ‘terrorists’ should have been “sought out and punished” in the manner that the US and Israel delivers justice.This is the sort of "drone" Nesbitt is listening to.

The contempt that the UUP shows for nationalists and their representatives was further evident in Derry when former republican prisoner Sinn Fein's Kevin Campbell was elected mayor of the city. Mary Hamilton of the UUP, the deputy mayor, refused to allow Mayor Campbell put the chains of office on her in a bid to outdo the outgoing mayor DUP mayor Maurice Devenney who refused to place the chains on Campbell. Devenney would have no problem in putting Campbell in chains, just not mayoral ones.

Even though he has removed the whip from Ken ‘two swallows don’t make a summer’ Maginnis, it was only after the party's officers had:

actually over-ruled Nesbitt's public call for an executive meeting to discuss the Maginnis debacle, then made matters worse by issuing a statement which didn't even come close to criticising the peer.

Revenge seems to be the watchword and Nesbitt’s own stance is facilitating such revanchist attitudes rather than pushing them back.  In a recent debate with Sinn Fein chair Declan Kearney, Nesbitt played to the backwoodsmen gallery rather than seriously address the issue under discussion.  He emerged the clear winner for two reasons, neither of which is rooted in his own political acumen. Kearney had not prepared his defences to meet the nature of the attack launched by Nesbitt; Sinn Fein’s position on the question of truth and reconciliation is hopelessly compromised by its stated desire for reconciliation but an aversion to the truth: which gives its demands for inquiries only into British state political killings the ring of ‘half the truth sets you free’. It was easy for Nesbitt to bust such a rampart.

Yet what did he achieve other than to remind his audience that they should cling tenaciously to any reminder of the past so that it would continue to serve as an impediment to the present? In the end Nesbitt’s was a pyrrhic victory, something that, as Brian Rowan observed, ‘was more smug than smart, and it was a missed opportunity to engage seriously on the past and on the issue of reconciliation.’

Rowan was not criticising Nesbitt for having serious problems with the political violence of the IRA, stating that ‘his “war crimes” question is perfectly fair.’  But Rowan contextualised this with a serious point that Nesbitt, with typical unionist myopia, seems unable of comprehending. Republican war crimes may surely be discussed: 

but in the right process when all the other “war crimes” questions are being asked – not of one side but every side, including the involvement of paid intelligence agents in murder. This will open the Special Branch, the Military and Security Service MI5 to the same questions.

Nesbitt has argued for a process which effectively avoids ‘painting the state and its security force personnel as the villains.’ The files of the British state should only be opened if the first in line are those of “McGuinness, M” and “Adams, G”. The UUP will stand shoulder to shoulder with those who made the decision ‘to don uniforms, put themselves in harm’s way, and held the line against an existential threat to Northern Ireland”.

Mike Nesbitt is much too familiar with the victims question to credibly assert that the British State was not up to its neck in killing people it claimed were its own citizens. His desire to frame the victims question in the context of republicans as victimisers par excellence underscores that, like Sinn Fein, the focus of the UUP under his leadership remains on recrimination rather than reconciliation. Yet his attitude of ‘follow me I’m right behind you’ has done little to prevent his party trailing well behind in opinion polls. In June the Belfast Telegraph had the UUP at its lowest ever level, 11%.

For all of that, rummaging around in the sectarian gutter where it can fight the DUP for votes at least allows us to see the UUP perspective: bragging rights trump all others.