MY online percentage calculator tells me that two million is 2.8 per cent of 70 million. The same online percentage calculator tells me that 2.8 per cent of 300 is 8.4.
I’m coming clean about my use of an internet tool to work out these figures because I don’t want you thinking I launched into this particular train of thought without doing due diligence. And now that I’ve made that clear, let me see if I can help you with what this is all about…
300 is the number of Gazan children that the UK government plans to fly over for treatment in the coming days. 2.8 per cent is the proportion of the population of the United Kingdom to be found in these six counties. And 8.4 is the number of children that will be sent here for treatment if the 300 wounded kids are distributed pro rata for treatment in hospitals across this Blessed Kingdom’s four realms.
Percentages present a technical difficulty when it comes to people, of course. The average family in the UK, for instance, has 1.75 children, which is not to say that most families have one whole child and three quarters of a child. The grim truth in this instance, however, is that many of the Gazan children arriving in the UK will indeed be missing significant percentages of their limbs and organs.
But let’s set that to the side and round my estimated figure up to nine. Nine children who will be arriving, most likely in the RVH and the City, with devastating battlefield wounds sustained not in trench or a tank, but in their tented homes or on their levelled streets as they took their mothers’ hands and set off in the increasingly desperate and deadly search for food.
I’ve a ridiculously simple view of the arrival of those nine children. My taxes helped pay for their legs or arms to be ripped off. My taxes helped pay for the multiple catastrophic injuries caused to their little bodies by the shrapnel that’s packed inside the 2,000lb bombs because the blast doesn’t do enough damage. My taxes supply the British parts that keep the Israeli F35s in the air. My taxes pay for endless RAF surveillance overflights of Gaza that pick out the next refugee camp for bombardment. So nine kids for treatment and surgery in a proper operating theatre and with anaesthetic? You can bet your army boots I want my taxes to go towards saving or improving the lives of a pathetically tiny amount of the children my money has gone towards blowing up, shooting or starving.
The DUP disagrees. The DUP thinks that our health service is already “overstretched” and that stitching up and reassembling nine babies, toddlers and schoolkids is “deeply unfair to our own citizens”. The DUP thinks we owe no debt of morality or responsibility to those our taxes have helped to maim.
At a talk at Féile an Phobail on Wednesday, DUP co-founder Wallace Thompson said: “Unionism goes out of its way to annoy the middle ground.” On the face of it, it’s a simple enough proposition, but to me it’s one of the most devastatingly succinct and accurate comments on where the union is at present. The undecideds, the getalongers, the fed-ups, the want-mores, the enough's enoughs are an audience that unionism should be courting, but it’s an audience that it seems to go out of its way to antagonise. And if the hope for the union is that a new generation of unionists will not have inherited that gift for antagonism, or at least will have been passed on a milder strain of it, then Wallace’s words are destined to remain firmly on-point.
Those DUP quotes from a few paragraphs back didn’t come from Edwin Poots, or Nigel Dodds or Gregory Campbell, or any of the other superannuated, thin-lipped Methuselahs who have made the DUP a byword for bitterness down through the decades. They came from Jonathan Buckley, a youngish Upper Bann MLA who seems to be permanently auditioning for the role of Loyal Ulster Malcontent-in-Chief. Let’s set aside his opposition to medical aid here for nine Gazan children, let’s instead consider why he volunteered to be DUP pointman on the topic.
Jonathan’s main claim to fame in his decade or so in the public eye has been to lose the true-blue seat of Lagan Valley to an Alliance Party girl who went to school on the Falls Road. And that's about as bad as it gets. The well-documented travails of former party leader Jeffrey Donaldson saw Jonathan contest the seat in last year’s general election, and what was expected to be a coronation turned into a public beheading as he shed 11.5 per cent of Jeffrey’s 2019 vote to hand Loyal, Royal Lisburn and Environs to Sorcha Eastwood.
OPPOSED: Jonathan Buckley thinks our health service is too "overstretched" to deal with injured Gazan children
The fall of Lagan Valley was coming, of course it was, but Jeffrey’s 6,000 majority suggested that Jonathan would hold off Sorcha for his party for another five years. In the event, Sorcha didn’t squeeze home, she racked up a hefty 3,000 majority, plunging the DUP into an existential funk, deepened by the equally devastating loss of North Antrim to to the TUV (and the ceding of South Antrim to Robin Swann of the UUP).
I’m sure Jonathan knows what I'm about to say – my dog does, and he’s been dead four years. But just in case it has somehow escaped his attention I’ll tell him anyway. Jonathan lost Lagan Valley because he failed to get the support of exactly the kind of people who shook their heads in disbelief when he spoke out against treating Gaza children in the RVH. I’m not saying Jonathan should be doing bright, breezy and inclusive Sorcha-style photo opps of the kind that voters in Lagan Valley have clearly taken to. He’d look silly waving a Pride flag, he probably doesn’t know many people with purple hair and drag reading time will in all likelihood remain Not His Thing.
But if he would struggle to connect with the people that won the election for Sorcha, you’d think the least he could do was try not to antagonise them.
