Make It Right

The debate over the Northern Ireland Bill of Rights has raised the question of whether economic and social rights belong in such a document. After all, that entails a significant transfer of power over economic and social policy from elected politicians to the judiciary. And that in turn entails such a significant, even if indirect, transfer of power over taxation.

The way to fight want, idleness, ignorance, squalor and ill health is to organise and support candidates and parties to that end. People throughout the United Kingdom now have that opportunity again.

And, following the boycott of the launch of the report into such a Bill both by the DUP and by the Catholic Church because of the absence of any proposal to protect the preborn child, people in Northern Ireland, unlike people in the Irish Republic, now have the opportunity to vote for a party which is pro-life and pro-family as well as pro-worker and anti-war.

Counterintuitive though it might be that there is currently no party specific to either part of Ireland giving political expression to Catholic thought, nevertheless that is the case. Just as it is the case (but then, it always was) that the best hope of such political expression for Northern Ireland’s Catholics is within the Union, making common cause with Northern Ireland’s mainstream Protestants, to whose culture the now dominant DUP is only marginally more connected than are the Marxist guerrillas of Sinn Fein to the culture of mainstream Catholics.