Dean Godson – Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism (страница 9)

Subsequently, Trimble sought to join the UUP but received no reply to his letter of application. The inertia of party HQ at Glengall Street in central Belfast seemed to him to incarnate all that was wrong with the organisation of the time. Glengall Street had failed to provide a sustained or coherent intellectual response to the critique of the Northern Irish state advanced by the nationalists and their left-wing allies on the mainland.¹² In consequence, says Trimble, ‘quite a few contemporaries tamely accepted this fashionable view of things – of a politically and morally corrupt establishment. There was a widespread view then of a poor, down-trodden minority. Those of the same age as me all went with the spirit of the times – Unionist Government bad, Civil Rights movement good. When things went pear-shaped, one gets the impression that the middle classes opted out of unionist politics altogether and headed for a safe port. They found it in the nice, uncontroversial New Ulster Movement and later in the Alliance party’. The reaction of one colleague from Queen’s was typical of the times: driving down the Shankill Road past Malvern Street, where an organisation styling itself as the ‘UVF’ had perpetrated a couple of grisly murders in 1966, his companion observed ‘ah, we’re passing your spiritual home’. Trimble was angered by the remark, but was not deterred. Indeed, the challenge of articulating a Unionist response also appealed to the counter-cyclical, even contrarian aspects of his nature: ‘My feeling that they were wrong was not entirely intellectual, it was in my bones as well. But it took me a couple of years to work things out. I usually do find myself uncomfortable with fashionable views and I have spent most of my life arguing against them.’¹³

Trimble, therefore, responded to the crisis in the only way he knew: he searched the stacks at Queen’s and read, read and read. There was a dearth of material. For although there had been some ‘Unionist’ historical writing during the Stormont years – such as St John Ervine’s biography of Sir James Craig, the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland – there had been little Unionist political thought since the 1950s.¹⁴ With their massive majorities at Stormont, and little opposition, Ulster Unionists had become complacent. Trimble’s aim over the last 30 years, and especially since becoming leader, has been two-fold: first, to persuade Unionists to think politically and not just to wave the Union flag at election time; and, as a consequence of that, to persuade the broad unionist middle classes to re-engage in politics. Later, Trimble found one unexpected source of inspiration. These were the publications of the British and Irish Communist Organisation (first known as the Irish Communist Organisation). Many then considered B&ICO was then a self-consciously Stalinist (but non-sectarian) faction. A substantial number of its leading lights believed that the British multi-national state was invested with certain progressive possibilities (by contrast, a large number of them contended that northern nationalism, encouraged by southern irredentist elements, was a sectional diversion from the reality of class struggle). Adapting Stalin’s theory of nationality to the Irish context, B&ICO had come to conclude that Irish republicans had fundamentally misanalysed the situation. Far from northern Protestants being a minority within the Irish nation, they were a distinct nation of their own, no less entitled than the Catholics to political self-determination: any attempt to coerce them would not merely be foredoomed to failure, but would also lead to a blood-bath by virtue of dividing the working class. This became known as the ‘two nations’ theory (at the same time, B&ICO also believed in civil rights for Catholics – and that the British state was the best vehicle for achieving these complementary ends). He was particularly influenced by three of their pamphlets: The Economics of Partition, The Birth of Ulster Unionism and The Home Rule Crisis 1912–14. In time, Trimble also became a fan of Workers’ Weekly, the newsletter of an allied organisation, the Workers’ Association for a Democratic Settlement of the National Conflict in Ireland – a compliment which that journal did not always reciprocate through the late 1970s and 1980s. It found him too devolutionist and Ulster nationalist for their more integrationist tastes (in its issue of 28 October 1978, following Trimble’s speech at the UUP conference, Workers’ Weekly described him as an ‘advocate of getting Stormont back at all costs’). After Trimble became leader, the links with the left endured. Thus, Paul Bew, Professor of Irish Politics at Queen’s and Henry Patterson, Professor of Politics at the University of Ulster – both of them formerly of the Workers’ Association – became two of his strongest supporters in academe. And John Lloyd, the staunchly Trimbleista former Editor of the New Statesman who later worked for the Financial Times, had been in B&ICO itself for a time.

The retreat to the ivory tower was perhaps a predictable response for a shy academic who felt he needed to be on intellectually secure ground before entering the fray. Curiously, Trimble’s unworldliness contributed in another very different way to his political education. From 1970–2 he lived for the only time in his life in Belfast – at 12 Kansas Avenue, just off the Antrim Road. He had moved into an area from which Protestants were rapidly departing. Nonetheless, he imagined that it was far enough up the Antrim Road and middle-class enough to avoid the clashes between the Catholic residents of the New Lodge and Protestants from the neighbouring Tiger’s Bay. If so, it proved a forlorn hope, for Trimble regularly witnessed many sectarian confrontations at Duncairn Gardens. The experience further convinced him of the inefficacy of the Ulster Unionist establishment’s approach, and that something more had to be done. But through what vehicle? Some of his contemporaries had joined the New Ulster Movement. To Trimble, however, the Alliance party did little to confront the Republican political offensive. Rev. Ian Paisley’s hardline Democratic Unionists would certainly have been a possibility for a Unionist who wanted to protest against the alleged weakness of their traditional leadership. But as Trimble saw it, Paisley did too little to save Stormont for his own partisan reasons: if the provincial parliament went, so too would the UUP’s patronage powers and therefore the DUP would be able to compete more equally with the UUP.¹⁵ Trimble met Paisley for the first time during the 1973 Assembly elections on a broad loyalist platform. His reaction was mixed: ‘One appreciated the broad earthy humour, and when he’s in a good mood he can be charming. And, obviously, he has considerable gifts of crowd oratory. I would not have been very well disposed to him because of the inconsistencies of his background – his integrationist views and his flirtation with negotiating with Irish nationalism. Then there was the raucousness of his presentation and his purely sectarian approach. I occasionally looked at the Protestant Telegraph [Paisley’s newspaper] and was struck by the crudity of it and that it contained too many vulgar quips from a churchman. And the more I think of it, it’s an accurate reflection of his personality.’¹⁶ For the bulk of the intervening three decades, the relationship of the two men would be antagonistic rather than cooperative. Both men are known for not mincing their words at each other.

It seemed to many, including David Trimble, that the abolition of Stormont was a precursor to a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland.¹⁷ Even Brian Faulkner, whose energy and dynamism Trimble had hitherto admired, seemed to him to have no clue as to how to respond. Only one man appeared to Trimble to have the answers: William Craig, sacked from O’Neill’s cabinet in 1968 for attacking the drift of Stormont’s policy. Craig anticipated that Heath would move against the Unionists and urged that Ulstermen prepare for the coming constitutional crisis. Subsequently, he condemned Faulkner for meekly acceding to the abolition of Stormont – reckoning that Faulkner should have called a Northern Ireland General Election to demonstrate that Heath’s unilateral violation of the 1920 constitutional settlement had no popular support.¹⁸ But Craig went further still. Although he was mild-mannered in private and was a flat platform speaker, he nonetheless had a flair for the dramatic pronouncement. ‘I can tell you without boasting that I can mobilise 80,000 men who will not seek a compromise in Ulster,’ he told a meeting of the Monday Club in the House of Commons. ‘Let us put bluff aside. I am prepared to kill and those behind me will have my full support for we shall not surrender.’¹⁹

Certainly Craig – like Trimble – vaulted into the national consciousness as a hardline Unionist. But both men were far more complex than they first appeared. Indeed, when each man eventually sought to treat with the representatives of Irish nationalism, their flexibility would amaze supporters and opponents alike. Born in 1924, Craig had been a gunner in RAF Lancaster bombers during the Second World War. After building up successful solicitor’s practices, he had entered the Northern Ireland Parliament for Larne in 1960. During the O’Neill era, he was portrayed (along with Faulkner) as a dynamic, modernising Wunderkind who could accomplish great things for the Province: a meritocratic, almost Wilsonian contrast with the ‘big house’ Unionists who largely ran the Province till 1971. Craig was also an ardent proponent of German-style federalism for the United Kingdom and Ireland. Significantly, Trimble recalls that Craig and he were the only two elected Unionists publicly to support a ‘Yes’ vote in the 1975 Referendum on the Common Market.²⁰ Moreover, most Ulster Unionists were instinctive Tories who until 1974 took the Conservative whip in the Commons – hence the latter party’s official title of ‘Conservative and Unionist’. By contrast, neither Craig nor Trimble were High Tories in the Enoch Powell mode.