Young
Unionists

I first met James Leslie in 2002 when he was a Junior Minister at the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister.  From then I knew him as one of lifes good guys, an approchable, genuinly nice man whose Unionism was very close to my own.  I spoke to him last on the 9th of January at a dinner we both attended.

His death whilst on holiday is shocking to all of us.  He was a young man, whose political career was far from over, and who still had much to give the people of Northern Ireland.

He will be deeply missed, and our thoughts are with his family.

Neil Wilson is the Chairman of Merseyside Conservative Future and grew up in County Down. He argues that the UUP/Conservative pact offers a credible future for Unionism.

The DUP are often keen to claim that they are ‘delivering for Ulster’ but their recent, often vehement, opposition to the recent electoral pact between the Conservatives and the UUP has given their game away.

A charge often levelled at the DUP is that of ‘little Ulsterism’. This is hardly surprising from a party whose former leader told a journalist to ‘get back to England’ when he didn’t like his line of questioning, yet manages to adorn all their literature with the Union Flag as if it is merely a symbol to be seen in a Northern Ireland context.

The worst example of little Ulsterism came in June last year when they decided to back Labour over 42 day detention, helping to prop up a government which has, for the last twelve years, been guilty of the worst type of constitutional vandalism and an erosion of liberties which the vast majority of British people find abhorrent.

People from Northern Ireland play a massive role in British society. Vast numbers of Northern Ireland’s youngsters now attend universities in England and Scotland. It is impossible to switch on any of the major news channels without hearing an Ulster accent. Soldiers from Northern Ireland excel in the ranks of the military, serving their country wherever they are required.

Northern Ireland punches above its weight in all aspects of British life. Seldom has a population of 1.75 million achieved so much, yet the lack of real representation at Westminster ensures that Northern Ireland’s voice goes unheard and that it remains at the edge of the Union, with its elected representatives content to negotiate payouts and concessions, rather than form opinions.

In his speech to the UUP conference, David Cameron told us he wants to “cement Northern Ireland’s position as a peaceful, prosperous and confident part of the United Kingdom”. DUP activists would surely argue that this is an aim all Unionists share, but why then, in the DUP’s view, is Northern Ireland not good enough to have the same input as the English, Scottish and Welsh to an all-British party of the Union?

The DUP’s vision of politics is dominated by contrasting images of hard and soft Unionism, backstabbing Englishmen and Catholics who are viewed purely through a religious prism. It’s horrendously rhetorical and counterproductive. It creates a party identification model based for the most part on religion and eschews the idea that people from different backgrounds can share common goals. Essentially, it is isolationist and far removed from the Unionism envisaged by Lord Carson on several counts. Eventually, the DUP’s particular brand of Unionism will fail.

Many Unionists complain that other British people fail to understand them. Indeed, questioning politically astute English friends about Northern Irish politics offers an insight into how little we are thought about, let alone understood. Unionism cannot be supported, if it is not understood and to be understood, it must have a presence at the heart of British politics. This is something the DUP have gone out of their way to avoid and an area where they will consistently fail to deliver. On the other hand, we Conservatives and Unionists see this as crucial.

The Conservative-UUP pact offers Northern Ireland two things. Firstly, the genuine chance of achieving the political representation it is due and secondly, of creating Unionism, based not on religion but by employing the best arguments we have – that the combined strength of the United Kingdom is far greater than the sum of all our parts.

This week has seen Northern Ireland confronting one its rawest emotions. However amongst our own problems a significant day in the remembrance of victims will have slipped by many peoples radars; Tuesday marked National Holocaust Day. It was 64 years since Soviet troops liberated the camp at Auschwitz in southern Poland and brought to an end the most awful example of human wickedness that this planet has ever seen. It was important that this camp was maintained in its more or less original state to remind us that this world can never again allow a single country to inflict such evil on human beings. I personally visited the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz this September with a few friends and I would definitely recommend the experience to anyone. It truly is a horrifying place and you really do need to physically stand in the gas chambers to fully understand the horror of which the camps prisoners must have felt in the moments leading up to their deaths The pictures attached to this blog are just a small number of which I took while I was there.

The reality of the camp strikes you immediately when you step in through those famous front gates. All the buildings are either original or build exactly to scale with original materials, the barbed wire is starting to rust and the steps inside the buildings have been visibly worn down by its estimated 22million visitors since its liberation.

The above picture on the left is just a small amount of the artificial limbs which the Nazis confiscated from the prisoners as they arrived at the camps. They were then often forced to hobble into the gas chambers while their limbs were sent away to be used by German soldiers injured in the war. On the left is a picture of a typical toilet block where 100s of prisoners would have been crammed in at a time therefore it was a constant struggle for the most primitave utilities.

Of course when the Nazis realised that death camps were a rather effective tool in their aim of wiping out a entire religion- the demand for space rose significantly. Therefore the original site at Auschwitz was expanded in 1941, with a new camp built just a short distance away at Birkenau; this was genocide on an industrial scale. Jews were now being purged throughout all the occupied territories and brought to this new camp shipped like cattle in trains. Hungary in particular suffered under the Nazis with an estimated 600,000 Hungarian Jews being killed in Birkenau.

The above building has to be on one of the most tragic sites that one could possibly visit. Although it may seem nothing more than a old unassuming shed, it is instead the first gas chamber on the Aushwitch original camp. You go inside the dark building and through a few rooms in which people were forced to undress, you then go into the next long room which although there is nothing to suggest it, is the gas chamber. The only feature it has is a small square hole in the roof in which the chemical pellets were poured in, these pellets would then produce a cyanide gas which would ultimately kill all those who came into contact with it. The bodies were then carried into the next room where the would be incinerated. On the Birkeneau camp the gas chambers were many times bigger and the bodies were often burned in piles in the open air.

It is estimated that 1.1million people were killed in the Auschwitz Camps, hundreds of thousands more died due to forced labour and malnourishment.  The Auschwitz Nazi commander, Rudolf Höss, was hanged only yards from the gas chamber where he ordered the death of thousands, the gallows still stand today in their original state as a constant reminder of the evil of which the human race is capable of undertaking.

Therefore whilst Northern Ireland has had its own problems with ethnic cleansing, we should remember the lives of the millions which were murdered in the German death camps- their only crime being their religious faith.