THE RNLI has turned down a donation of £850 from a Scottish flute band that was meant to be leading an Orange parade that was banned because it had spread “anxiety” throughout the host town.

That paragraph is not the most elegant thing I’ve ever written, but it’s a bald statement of fact about what happened in Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire. It’s also a grim and rather depressing indicator to our loyal brethren of what way the wind is blowing when it comes to dressing up and not liking Catholics.

The SS King Billy has been holed below the waterline for some time, sinking slowly as the waves of modernity lap over the deck. And when even the lifeboats don’t want anything to do with you, you either do something about it or you end up like John Travolta in that empty room meme – holding out your hands, shrugging your shoulders and wondering what tf’s going on around you.

There have been cursory attempts to incorporate anti-Catholic carryout culture into the mainstream, notably the Diamond Dan debacle (turned out the cartoon wasn’t theirs) and Orangefest (turned out Catholics don’t much like not being liked). But the membership continues to shrink and age and the leaders keep publicly pining for the 1950s. The only thing that’s keeping the power on for the life support machine is the still-huge coverage in the mainstream media, which seems to think that Catholic readers, viewers and listeners are happy to smile wryly, tut indulgently and ignore the colourful images of people enjoying themselves by not liking Catholics.

BBC Loyal Ulster stopped its live coverage a couple of years ago because the already tiny morning audience was increasingly switching over to old episodes of Murder, She Wrote on Dave. But it is still by some distance the largest and most expensive outside broadcast of the year – so much so that they have to employ Catholics, for goodness sake, to make the evening round-up possible. UTV does the same, although – as usual – it does what the BBC does in a kind of cheerfully cheap, flatpack, photocopied instruction leaflet kind of way.

The Belfast Telegraph – to its credit – does its full-colour supplement in a slightly apologetic way these days, aware that an event with no Catholics is not what you’d call a circulation builder, but too tied in to the past to do the right thing. The News Letter, of course, continues to pretend that Shaftesbury Square on the Twelfth is like the New Orleans Mardi Gras for the reformed faith.

There are lots more Protestants in Scotland than there are in Loyal Ulster  – numerically and proportionally. Even so, neither BBC Scotland nor STV give the Orange in Scotland a fraction of the coverage that BBCNI and UTV do here. I don’t know why that is – you’d have to ask the Brethren Broadcast Corporation and Loyal Ulster Television.

An invitation to boo

A LOT of commentary and high emotion in the wake of the Gaza ceasefire demo at the US Consulate on Saturday after a young female Sinn Féin speaker was barracked by elements of the crowd. A Palestinian guest who pleaded with the crowd to let Clíodhna Nic Bhranair speak failed to get order too. Which was nice.

At the risk of falling out with Clíodhna, I would simply point out that if she’s going to go to a march where she’s not wanted, if she’s going to elbow her way on to the podium and hijack the microphone, then I'm sorry, but she got precisely what she deserved.

Furtherm… 

Wait, what’s that? Sinn Féin were invited to the march? Really? And they were guests of the organisers on the podium? You don’t say.

BARRACKING: Clíodhna Nic Bhranair continues to speak at the rally
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BARRACKING: Clíodhna Nic Bhranair continues to speak at the rally

Funny kind of way to express unhappiness with the Sinn Féin decision to go to Washington for Paddy’s. Personally speaking, if I was really hacked off with my Uncle Jimmy I wouldn’t invite him to my birthday party in the Roddy’s and ask him up on the stage for a few rebel songs. I'd just tell him to stay away. It would save all the trouble of me booing him when he walked in the door and bucking chicken goujons at him when he started singing.

All of which is to say that it appears as though the barracking of Clíodhna – who to her credit cracked on regardless – might not have been an unfortunate and unseen consequence of the invite, but rather the whole point of it.

Starmer flies too close to the Sun – again

LABOUR leader Sir Keir Starmer is concerned about the fact that people are starving to death in Gaza. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer seems to be unaware that the statement by him – and other political notables around the world – that Israel was entitled to starve Gaza of water and food is directly to blame for the fact that people are starving in Gaza.

Keir is as clear as day, however, on the tiny St George’s Cross on the back of the neck of the new England shirt. He’s dead against Nike colouring the cross blue and purple rather than red and white – and he wants them to change it back.

'I'm a big football fan, I go to England games, men and women's games, and the flag is used by everybody. It is a unifier. It doesn't need to be changed. We just need to be proud of it,” he said. “I think they should just reconsider this and change it back. I’m not even sure they can properly explain why they thought they needed to change it in the first place.”

It took Keir five minutes from the Daily Mail kicked off about the woke new shirt until he issued his first statement condemning it. It took him four and half months from the first innocents started to die in Gaza until he said it might –  just might, mind you – be a good idea to stop. But just for a while.

ANOTHER U-TURN: Keir Starmer being interviewed by the Sun's Harry Cole
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ANOTHER U-TURN: Keir Starmer being interviewed by the Sun's Harry Cole

Starmer said these things in a podcast hosted by the Sun’s Harry Cole. In a previous life Starmer pledged to have nothing to do with the Sun. During his successful campaign for the Labour leadership, Starmer told the relatives of the Hillsborough disaster he would have nothing to do with the paper – remarks for which he received rapturous applause; 18 months later he was writing a column for it; on Thursday he was having a pally chat with the Sun’s Boris Johnson-loving Westminster guy.

97 people died at Hillsborough in 1989, which, compared to 30,000 in Gaza, makes his Sun U-turn very far from Starmer’s most shameful moment. But with Liverpool home to half a million people – most of them traditional Labour – it could prove a lot more damaging.