Campaigns of civil disobedience and passive resistance could politically backfire badly on those planning to use those tactics to oppose Boris Johnson’s Brexit strategy, according to political commentator, John Coulter. You can follow John on Twitter at @JohnAHCoulter.

Activists who believe Boris Johnson’s strategy to ensure the UK leaves the EU on 31 October – deal or no deal – can be opposed by a street campaign of civil disobedience would do well to remember Northern Ireland’s experience of such tactics.

Civil disobedience and passive resistance look like workable strategies in a democratic society – provided those campaigns are not hijacked by militants or extremists.

Half a century ago, civil rights protestors took to the streets of Northern Ireland to campaign for better conditions for the state’s working class. While this movement was associated with addressing issues that typically affected Catholic working-class communities, working-class Protestant communities faced many similar socio-economic challenges.

The late Ian Paisley came to power in the Unionist strongholds of the Stormont constituency of Bannside and the Westminster constituency of North Antrim by giving a voice to two previously silent majorities in those constituencies: evangelical Christians and working-class Protestants.

Paisley’s tactics with the latter were stunningly simple – he got inside toilets for Protestant working-class housing estates and confined the so-called ‘slop buckets’ to the dustbin. His various religious crusades in the region provided an outlet for the evangelicals.

So how did the toilet tactic relate to civil disobedience, you may ask? In County Antrim in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ulster Unionism was dominated by liberal Presbyterianism religiously and by the ‘Big House’ Unionist families politically. The political scene was run by the upper middle class and ‘aristocratic’ Protestant farming families. The Protestant working-class bluntly did not have a say in the running of the Unionist Party.

While Stormont Prime Minister Terence O’Neill recognised the need for change in the 1960s, those who followed Paisley along with the lower middle-class in Unionism did not agree.

To attend a Unionist meeting in those days literally required a written ticket or invitation. Such meetings were ‘no go’ areas for working class Protestants, and so began a campaign of civil disobedience as a payback to the Paisley campaign of getting such working-class Protestants their inside loos!

Lower middle-class Unionists began giving their meeting tickets to working class Paisleyites who, in turn, infiltrated Unionist Party meetings and began heckling the speakers.

‘Big House’ Unionists began to stay away from such meetings because of the heckling, with such civil disobedience leading to rapidly dwindling attendance at Unionist Party branch meetings as the Paislyites systematically drove ‘Big House’ Unionists out of their traditional Orange Hall meeting places.

As a result, Unionist Party branches across North Antrim began to close, especially as the Protestant Unionist campaign of heckling gave way to the formation of the Democratic Unionist Party in 1971.

However, what Paisley was able to achieve was to prevent his fledgling DUP from being taken over by the reformed UVF and later the UDA. In short, Paisley had the skill of bringing working-class Protestants onto the streets for parades without the fear of those demonstrations descending into violence.

This was a scenario which the civil rights movement seemed unable to replicate. It can be suggested that its campaign was hijacked by the fledgling Provisional IRA and militant republicans who were able to use the civil rights movement’s campaign of civil disobedience as a springboard for a widespread terrorist campaign which the IRA of 1956-62 could not achieve.

Likewise, in 1974, the Ulster Workers’ Council strike succeeded in collapsing the power-sharing Sunningdale Executive because the combined Unionist leadership of the day could to a large degree control the activities of the Ulster Defence Association on the streets of Northern Ireland.

However, what the Unionist political leadership could not control was the terrorist activities of the Mid Ulster UVF in 1974. Apart from bringing down Sunningdale, the Unionist leadership lacked a workable alternative to put in the place of the power-sharing Executive.

During the UWC Strike, the UVF set off no warning bombs in Dublin and Monaghan killing over 30 people and injuring almost 300. The UVF attack came after the Dublin government attempted to put forward its ideas to fill the political vacuum with the inevitable collapse of Sunningdale looming.

However, the violence by the UDA and UVF which contributed to the collapse of power-sharing also drove numerous soft unionist voters into the arms of the Alliance Party, with it winning 70 council seats in the 1977 local government poll – up seven seats, while the ruling UUP lost 18 seats.

Worse was to follow for Unionism in 1986 and 1998, when civil disobedience got out of hand. In 1986, the Unionist political leadership called a Day of Action to protest against the previous year’s Anglo-Irish Agreement. However, the day eventually descended into violence and many unionists walked away from the ‘Ulster Says No’ campaign.

In 1998 – the same year as the Good Friday Agreement and the success of pro-Agreement parties in the first Assembly poll – Drumcree was the political hot potato in Portadown. That year also witnessed a massive campaign of civil disobedience against the decision not to allow Orange Order members to parade back into Portadown via the mainly nationalist Garvaghy Road.

However, loyalist violence included the deaths of three young Catholic brothers in an arson attack in Ballymoney – in the heartland of Rev Ian Paisley’s North Antrim constituency.

Three Orange Order chaplains who issued an appeal for Orangemen to leave Drumcree Hill as a mark of respect to the three dead brothers later received death threats from the Loyalist Volunteer Force, a breakaway terror gang formed by the late Billy Wright before he was shot dead inside the Maze prison by members of the INLA in December 1997.

Again, the impact was to drive many unionists away from both the specific Drumcree protest and the Loyal Orders.

Taken as a benchmark, the Northern Ireland experience could in some way replicate itself in the rest of the UK, where there have already been numerous street protests against Brexit, and specifically against the Prime Minister’s ‘suspend Parliament’ strategy.

The danger in escalating protests by calling for campaigns of civil disobedience and passive resistance on the streets is that those campaigns become hijacked by extremists for their own ends and result in violence against the police.

Without doubt, civil disobedience is a high risk tactic that can have unpredictable consequences. If it backfires on democrats opposed to Brexit, it could descend into a law and order issue. In this scenario, the anti-Brexit camp may have lost the moral high ground. Again, it will be necessary to ascertain which specific forms of civil disobedience would be acceptable.

At the moment, the anti- and pro-Brexit camps have organised legal street protests and rallies. In the Northern Ireland experience, civil disobedience involved the withholding of payments for rates, and the blocking of roads with sit-down protests and vehicles to create barricades. But what happens if these tactics result in people being brought before the courts? Who will take the blame for any further consequences – the people involved in the civil disobedience, or the political representatives who called the people onto the streets?