Northern Ireland: Disagreement-Free Zone

With Scotland well on the way down the same road.

Northern Ireland has four main parties, which pretend to oppose and even despise each other, but which in fact are all in government all the time, so that none of them is asking any questions. Of those, two really matter, they are always the same two, and their appeal is based on pretending to stand for things for which they simply no longer do.

This seems to be completely invisible from the inside, even though to anyone looking at the place it is the first thing that we spot. Much as people in the Republic insist that their two main parties are different and indeed hate each other, when in fact the only difference is based on which sides people's families fought for in the Civil War. The continuing impact or otherwise of any of that is evident from comparing the actual policies and records of those parties in more recent times up to the present day. I say "compare". It is not possible to "contrast". There is nothing between which to "contrast".

Imagine a hung Parliament, and imagine what each of the Northern Irish parties would require as the price of their support. They wouldn't. They wouldn't do it like that. They would all get together and come up with a single list, which they would all pretty much have had anyway, and which they would collectively present to a Labour or Tory Leader. Based on anything like recent form, none of them would care tuppence which party's Leader he was. But then, why should they?

This bears no resemblance to wanting a dozen or so parties to contest elections and the half-dozen or so who do best all to be able to protect the interests of their voters. It bears no resemblance to wanting a situation in which in practice the powers in the land always include a High Tory party, an Old Labour Left party, an Old Liberal party (indeed, quite possibly the old Liberal Party), a party of economically and socially libertarian foreign policy hawks (about which last aspect they would mercifully never be able to do anything), and an economically social democratic party of morally and socially conservative British and Commonwealth patriots. But I digress.

Similarly, there is the strange idea that the Good Friday Agreement represented a victory for Nationalism. That Agreement requires that any constitutional change must be approved by the majority in both communities, and defines one of those communities specifically by its Unionism. So it can never, by definition, consent to such a change; anyone who does is by definition not in that community, since it is defined, not by Protestantism or any sort of culture, but simply by Unionism. That change which can therefore never happen. Again, this seems to be invisible to Gerry Adams and Jim Allister alike. Or is it? After all, it is there in black and white. Adams has signed up to it. And assuming that Allister has lost his seat, so will have everyone else of any importance in Northern Ireland come Monday morning.