You may not agree with Peter Robinson’s brilliant characterisation of Jim Allister as the unionist equivalent of Hiroo Onoda, the last Japanese soldier still fighting a war that ended 30 years before.

Nevertheless, you have to agree that Allister is simply the most extreme, and extreme is the word, version of a unionist syndrome, a belief that the future can be, should be, the same as the past.

The most obvious manifestation of that syndrome is the constant repetition of the demand for ‘unionist unity’. For what it was worth, unionist unity in elections hasn’t existed since 1969 when the arch-bigot Paisley fractured it. We know it will never come to pass.

Fair enough, but the thinking behind the demand is inherently flawed because it harks back to the past and the nostalgia for the days when there was a cast-iron unionist majority, when there was one, maybe two nationalist seats at Westminster, when there was an overwhelming unionist majority at Stormont.

Alex Kane: Change may come slowly for unionism, but it is happening

Brian Feeney: Why do unionist leaders say the future can be the same as the past?

Why can no unionist leader come to terms with the reality of accelerating demographic change and face up to the fact that........

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