THIS obsession on the airwaves and in the press here with the ins and outs of the agonies of the British Labour Party, and its prospects in the local government and devolved assembly elections, displays all the classic syndromes of the colonised.

For the colonised the world revolves around the ‘motherland’, despite the indisputable fact that no politician in the ‘motherland’ gives tuppence about what anyone here thinks.

No-one here has any input into policy or decision-making in England.

No-one here can vote for the Labour Party. In fact the British Labour Party makes damn sure no-one can, by sedulously supporting the fiction that you can vote for its – wait for it – ‘sister party’, the SDLP.

Tom Collins: Ulster University has nobody to blame but itself

Alex Kane: Cancel the state visit, Charles. Trump doesn’t give a damn about you or anyone else

You can vote Conservative, but few do – mostly in North Down where they can pretend they’re in England.

Such syndromes are not the result exclusively of British colonialism.

French colonists in Algeria thought they were French, though many had never been to France.

When they fled after 1958, they discovered the French didn’t accept them as French. They called them ‘pied noirs’.

Frantz Fanon, from Martinque in the French West Indies, thought he was French too until he arrived in France and discovered he was a black West Indian psychiatrist.

His psychiatric training helped him analyse why and how the colonised react as they do, develop a false consciousness, an identity crisis.

He studied and wrote about the psychopathology of colonisation. Fanon’s writing had a profound influence on decolonisation and decolonising movements.

Fanon’s analyses explain the cognitive dissonance of people like Robert Mugabe studying for English exam courses in Rhodesia, and Gandhi studying Law in London and being called to the Bar in the Inner Temple, later travelling to live in another part of the British empire, South Africa.

They all had one thing in common. At some point they realised: “Hey, wait a minute. This isn’t me. This is a con job. I’m not British. I don’t even know what that is.”

Decolonisation has now reached the bewildering stage that the British don’t know what British is.

Some on the far right claim you have to be white and born in England to be British. Others say it doesn’t matter what colour your skin as long as you’re born in Britain.

Yet others say you can become a British citizen (for a fee and after some years living in Britain) and call yourself British, but are you?

British governments have been moving the goalposts since the end of World War II as immigration from their former empire grew exponentially.

The best book examining the tightening criteria is ‘We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and The End of Empire’, by Ian Sanjay Patel.

Patel examines the series of immigration laws from 1948 to 1971, showing how they turned arrivals from the Caribbean, Asia and Africa from British citizens into immigrants.

By the late 1960s, the Labour government decided to stem what was perceived as a “vast immigration crisis” of British citizens by blocking their entry.

In effect they redefined British citizenship along racial lines. The notion of the Commonwealth was undermined.

As more and more former colonies became independent, their inhabitants ceased to be recognised as British citizens. The barriers to their settlement in Britain grew higher.

Ultimately the barriers became Theresa May’s “hostile environment” which retrospectively penalised immigrants who had arrived decades earlier as British citizens, but couldn’t prove it because when they arrived in the 1950s they didn’t need proof.

So back to this place, the last remnant of England’s first colony, where the colonisation syndromes are strong among those who identify as British.

They do have the advantage of being white, so can merge more easily with the majority English population.

Yet the English still regard them as Irish. Indeed, in Westminster many MPs refer to the diminishing DUP bloc as “the Irish”.

This place is a peculiarly anomalous appendage. In the UK but not in Britain.

The only part of the 1927 reduced UK that is legally entitled to secede.

The only part where people can decide to be British or Irish or both.

The only part of the UK where people don’t vote for British political parties.

Yet in state (de facto Protestant) schools, history is taught as if the pupils were living in England, with a pejorative glance at Irish Home Rule and the Rising.

Only later do those pupils discover that people in Britain don’t retain any sentimental attachment to this place and some are in a state of total ignorance.

The former proconsul Karen Bradley provided the definitive proof.

After years at Westminster, she arrived here to run the north, ignorant of the fact that unionists and nationalists vote for different parties.

If you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article and would like to submit a Letter to the Editor to be considered for publication, please click here.

Letters to the Editor are invited on any subject. They should be authenticated with a full name, address and a daytime telephone number. Pen names are not allowed.

© The Irish News