Belfast unionists must shout ever louder to assert their Britishness

Unionists of Northern Ireland fight on For the past 18 months, Tommy Hefferon has been walking up and down a footpath at the top of Twaddell Avenue, a sectarian faultline in north Belfast, sporting a Union Jack anorak and an Orange Order sash, proudly displaying his loyalty to the United Kingdom.

The 56-year-old unemployed driver is part of the Friday shift at a bedraggled "protest camp" set up in this contested corner of the city after a July 12 loyalist march was effectively banned in 2013 when its route was changed by the authorities. He was joined by one other protester on a recent morning, but the protest has attracted larger crowds angered by the route change and demanding that their cultural rights, as they see them, be reinstated.

For Mr Hefferon and other working-class loyalists, the assertion of their Britishness was once taken for granted. Now, nearly two decades after a fragile but enduring peace descended on this violence-scarred part of the UK, it is something that has to be asserted increasingly loudly in the teeth of power-sharing, Sinn Fein triumphalism and the indifference and even hostility of the rest of the UK.

"No, I don't think I'm the last unionist - there's plenty like me," he says, sheltering from the biting wind in the Twaddell and Woodvale residents' association hall. "But I can't deny that we are a diminishing number."

Barely a month from the UK general election, the union has rarely looked more fragile. Scotland came close to secession in September. The UK Independence party has exposed the social and political gap between the centre and margins in England. The north-south divide is as wide as ever. Yet for some in this corner of Belfast the union remains an article of faith - almost literally.

From the armed forces and Westminster parliament to the monarchy (sometimes), Northern Ireland's Protestant working class remains in thrall to the union. Yet they would also be the first to protest that this union has betrayed them, especially through the Good Friday Agreement and its accommodations with violent Irish republicanism.

Winston Irvine, a loyalist politician and spokesman for the Twaddell Avenue protesters, insists the protest is mainly about a local issue and should not be burdened with too much symbolism. Nevertheless, he admits it is essentially a lingering cultural manifestation of the Troubles, as the 30 years' of violence that beset Northern Ireland up to the early 1990s are known.

Peter Shirlow, an academic at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, says they represent a strain of unionism, "which feels embittered and trapped and which covers up its vulnerability by performing its Britishness" - the Union Jack dressing-up, the sashes and bowler hats, the "no surrender" absolutism of their insistence on the sanctity of the traditional parade routes. Their unionism is an ethnic identity, not a political one as it is in Scotland. "That's what sets them apart in the UK," says Prof Shirlow, deputy director of the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice at Queen's.

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Loyalist culture and heritage have little traction outside Northern Ireland. When it looked as if the Scots would vote to quit the UK, party leaders at Westminster rushed north to beg them to stay. Prof Shirlow says it is unlikely that there would be a similar rush to Belfast if the people of Northern Ireland ever looked like doing the same.

Yet the union, or their idealised version of it, resonates deeply with men such as Mr Hefferon. For him, the Twaddell Avenue protest is about more than parades. "This is the last stand, it can go no further," he says. "I am a loyalist and that means loyalty to the union. I was born British and I will die British."

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