The loyalists' rolling riot is a reminder of the dangers of complacency in the face of widespread alienation
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Loyalist protesters hold union flags outside Belfast city hall. Photograph: Peter Muhly/AFP/Getty Images
The horsemeat discovered in some hamburgers produced in the Republic of Ireland will do no harm to anyone's health. But what about the horseshit that currently passes for political discourse, and which is causing nightly rioting, over Belfast city council's "compromise" decision to fly the union flag on only 17 designated days of the year? (One of them, by the way, is St Patrick's Day.)
Despite the robust efforts of the British media to play down the riots – they are rarely on page one or at the top of news bulletins, even during a slow news Christmas period such as the one just ended – they are unsettling to the brittle peace that slowly replaced the 30-year Troubles after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. No one has been killed but more than 60 police officers have been wounded (how many rioters?) and over 100 arrests have been made.
It may seem far off, but it's only an hour or so away by air; and the kind of urban disorder we are seeing – or not seeing – on our TV screens is not so far away from the London riots, perpetrated by people with a sense of grievance and a shopping list. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's chilling Guardian reports from the ancient but wrecked Syrian city of Aleppo over Christmas were a shocking reminder of the dystopian horrors that can quickly develop when law and order (even the tyrannical kind) lapses into lawless anarchy. There is no guarantee that anyone anywhere is immune – not even bankers, who think they are.
With both halves of Ireland badly hit by the recession (the north's housing boom came late but tanked severely all the same), Belfast's nasty skirmishes are damaging to hopes of investment and jobs. David Cameron's bold decision to locate this summer's G8 summit in Enniskillen prompted unhelpful articles about the security situation: just what the summit doesn't need. The CBI reckons Belfast city has lost £15m of trade it can ill afford to lose since the riots began.
It will be all right on the night. But what about the nights in between? Last night seems to have been quieter than most (too chilly out there?) of the last 40. Bad rates (ie, the council tax equivalent) debt and the horsemeat controversy dominate BBC Northern Ireland's website, though the warning from the chief constable, Matt Baggott, about teenagers being exploited by loyalist paramilitaries is worth checking. It's the same story the world over: by the time the kids realise, it's sometimes too late because they're dead.
What's going on? Chiefly a lack of local political leadership at all levels, by the sound of it. What made me spill my coffee the other day was hearing the historian Ruth Dudley Edwards explaining to an English radio audience that Sinn F̩in and the IRA are well-organised and hierarchical Рreflecting their Catholic heritage Рwhile the unionists and their working-class loyalist colleagues are divided. The culture of presbyterianism, in particular, was the opposite of hierarchical Рno one in in charge, and proud of it Рshe added. So there have been days when east Belfast has been engulfed in petrol bombs and plastic bullets while the Shankill Road, historic centre of militant loyalism, has been tranquillity itself, so it's reported.
True or exaggerated? I don't know. But it struck a chord. When in doubt, an ignorant outsider such as myself goes to websites nowadays, to the Guardian's enterprising correspondent Henry McDonald or to the raucous exchanges hosted by Mick Fealty, trading as Slugger O'Toole.
What seems to be the case is that while Sinn Féin is happy to uphold the peace process, participate in government, draw salaries and generally behave like adults, it also sanctions some sideline political activity to keep its more fundamentalist adherents happy (as distinct from the violent breakaway factions, I should stress). These would seem to include stirring up the fuss over the union flag atop City Hall, a characteristically grandiose building.
As plenty of smart people point out, if the Shinners are reduced to that sort of symbolic campaign (and there are others), it's a measure of how far they have come towards accepting the substance, as distinct from symbols, of continuing British rule. It's not as if the republic, under German economic tutelage (a 1916 irony there), is such an attractive bet, or that its politicians are inclined to search out new burdens.
But in Northern Ireland there are always suckers who fall for a Sinn Féin provocation. And sure enough, disaffected loyalists from depressed working-class districts such as the Lower Newtownards Road have duly obliged. It's a rerun of the cruel old joke that republicans are too clever to admit they've lost and loyalists too stupid to see they've won. Only the other day, someone reminded me of another unkind story: that republican prisoners in the Maze did college courses while Protestant paramilitaries did bodybuilding.
But it is certainly true that educational achievements are low, that the old industries once dominated by the Protestant working class – by means of sectarian employment practices – such as shipbuilding (pubs, too), are a vestigial shadow of their past and that the loyalist working class does not feel properly represented by the parties that sit in relatively cosy grand coalition at that other grandiose building known as Stormont. It's what we might call a "democratic deficit", if this were Strasbourg, Brussels or even Westminster.
Apart from the riots in defence of what they see as a threatened symbol of unionism – the flag – many of the rioters probably don't feel they have cheery prospects. They don't share the prosperity they can see in Belfast's poshed-up city centre, now free again of security procedures and bombs, and their territory is being nibbled away by gentrification. That's a familiar story, too. They have my sympathy, though not my approval.
The consequences are plentiful, but so is the hidden string-pulling. Belfast city council lost its unionist majority a while back (disaffected loyalist voters staying at home didn't help), and the SF/SDLP nationalists now have marginally more seats between them than the other side, under a PR voting system that helps fragment blocs. The Progressive Unionist party, which represents working-class loyalism, has just two councillors; the middle-class, non-sectarian Alliance (whose peers take the Lib Dem whip at Westminster) has six, and holds the balance.
It was the Alliance's fateful decision to back the compromise vote on the city hall flag in early December that triggered the loyalists' rolling riot. It doesn't make things easier for threatened Alliance councillors that their then lord mayor of the city, Naomi Long, unexpectedly won the East Belfast seat at the 2010 UK general election, ousting the first minister and DUP leader, Peter Robinson, who had been been embroiled in some "swish family Robinson" scandal.
But it's about more than seats and representation: just as the republicans have run assorted lucrative rackets down the years – over and above bank robberies – so the loyalists have their own. Baggott accuses them of using rioting kids to send a warning to the state not to unleash the Serious Crime Agency or HMRC on them to investigate past crimes or current rackets. It sounds lawless, and it is: closer to the world Ghaith described in Aleppo of extortion, arbitrary violnce and warlordism than anyone would wish.
No. Belfast isn't going to descend into that sort of chaos: it has seen too much. And nor is anywhere else in Britain. But Theresa May is now cutting police pay, so any trouble will result in disaffected young men facing each other on both sides of the picket line. There will be no coppers waving bonus cheques at strikers, as some did in the 1984-85 miners' strike.
The enemy is always complacency. It can't happen here? Where there is poor leadership and widespread alienation, who says?