The past century has seen many empires crumble and decline, some slowly and by degrees such as the British Empire, some quickly, overtaken by their own sense of self importance and entitlement such as the third reich and south Africa.
Which brings me to Jeffrey.
Looking at Jeffrey’s history it is obvious why. His political life began in South Down as an activist with Enoch Powell. He then joined the UUP. When he fell out with them (because he couldn’t stomach the GFA), he joined the DUP. He is now what passes for a “Leader” with them. There is a thread of consistency here, he has loyalty to nobody but himself. He has my best wishes on that score. He also has my pity and concern because Jeffrey’s weak point is obvious, he seeks approval.
The weakness in this is that he hasn’t yet come to terms with the fact that he is a politician who argues for a minority opinion within a minority community. I know that his real/actual issue is serving with a Sinn Fein first Minister, I think we all do.
He is perfectly entitled to argue for his opinions and beliefs, what he is not entitled to do is to inflict them on the rest of us as he constantly attempts to. It is time he woke up to that fact. Nationalist and Republican people in the North East of Ireland know what it is like to have an identity forced upon them. It won’t be happening again.
The difficulty he now has is that events have overtaken him and those who hold similar opinions, our conversation is now active, live and happening about how our new Ireland will look.
Up until the late 1960’s, Unionism actively sought to preserve their manufactured majority by denying basic rights to those they viewed as “unfriendly”. People like myself. That was active policy by means of denial of votes, housing, education, benefits, jobs, voices.
It failed.
Now their latest great idea is the “Protocol”. Where do I start?
For starters, the real problem is actually BREXIT. The one championed by guess who? Oh yeah……………………….
The one voted AGAINST by a majority of people here.
We now know that a majority of people actually favour the protocol mitigations as a defence against the economic damage inflicted on us by the DUP Brexit nonsense.
It will be interesting to see how people react now that he is in inflicting yet another election upon us.