Uncivil Partnerships

Carla Lockhart resigned from the DUP 40 years to the day after Ruairí Ó Brádaigh had led his supporters out of the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis to constitute the Republican Sinn Féin that has one council seat in Galway and no other elected representation anywhere. There is a message in that somewhere. And such walkouts seem to be in season. Never mind whether Haley Stevens now agreed with Mike Rogers. What do he and the Republican Party find so welcome about any endorsement by her?

Similarly, since Labour is prepared to collapse the local government of 11 council areas, including the tenth largest city in the country, out of loyalty to a foreign state, then many people might reasonably ask why it had previously found the Green Party an acceptable coalition partner. But at least as good a question is why the Greens had been prepared to do so such deals with Labour. And the answer is that, again rather like Sinn Féin, as soon as they are in office rather than in opposition, then they vote giddily for cuts and austerity. Their conduct of successive bin strikes was so union-busting that anyone would have thought that Brighton and Hove was a Labour council at the time.

The state without whose approval the governing party of the United Kingdom refuses to enter into municipal cooperation still supports the Argentine claim to the Falkland Islands, having armed Argentina during the Falklands War. On 1 April 2024, it killed James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman, unarmed British veterans who were delivering humanitarian aid, whom it bombed three times to make sure that they were dead, as could not have been an accident.

Britain has named and condemned the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, an ideology that gave rise to ethnic cleansing must by definition be racist, Britain has welcomed the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, Pillay chaired the Commission of Inquiry that found Israel to be committing genocide in Gaza, an ideology that gave rise to genocide must by definition be racist, and an ideology that forbade coalition with parties for which the wrong ethnic group had voted is racist no matter how many people adhered to it.

In any case, Jews are half of one per cent of the United Kingdom’s population, and a third or more of that tiny minority does not identify with Zionism. There are no more than 200,000 Zionist British Jews, less than a fifth of the 943,598 votes for the BNP at the 2009 European Elections. Yet the Labour Party did not allow that to dictate its arrangements for the administration of any local authority. Think on.