Supermarket chain ASDA has bowed to sectarian protest by reinstating Loyalist William Hunter to his post. Hunter had previously been dismissed for suggesting that a customer play The Sash in his car. Hundreds of loyalists, led former UVF member Billy Hutchinson, picketed the shopping centre intimidating people away from the area. Protesters placards stated that ‘Our Forefathers Fought for this Sash’ and claimed that ASDA was a ‘culture robber’.

The sash is not a piece of culture but a blatantly sectarian song played by loyalist marching bands. Hunter himself is a hardened loyalist and a convicted murderer. He was one of two men convicted in 1975 for the murder of two Catholic brothers Thomas and John McErlane . Both were killed at a flat while playing cards with their Protestant work mates in the Mount Vernon estate.

Disgracefully this murder took place within the vicinity of the ASDA complex. It is also just yards from where 15 years old schoolboy Thomas Devlin was set upon and killed by Loyalists in 2005.

William Hunter’s comments came just days after the annual 12th July parade in the North –which still celebrates Protestant triumphalism and Catholic exclusion with the Sash as its anthem. 

Socialists are in favour of working class people fighting bosses for better conditions and fighting for a better world. We have no truck with corporations like ASDA which pay poverty wages. But we also don’t support workers spouting racism or sectarianism. Sectarianism is a tool which divides us, and workers and trade unionists must oppose it in all its guises, especially in the work place. Loyalism is not about culture, but about division.

Faced with huge cutbacks from the Tories in Britain and SF & DUP in the North workers will need to unite to fight back. This will not be done on the basis of the community or culture we supposedly come from, but on the basis of the class which we belong to.