It’s not the economy stupid, but who is going to be First Minister
Because Northern politics doesn’t cleave on normal left-right lines and because civil servants come in all shapes and sizes (and religions), no one dare says “boo”.
The unionist parties are scarcely any different. Relations between the UUP (“DUP-SF cuts”) and the DUP — which does a subtle line in blaming the Brits too — are especially venomous when it comes to National Health Service closures.
Each blames the other. Some are even predicting that if the DUP can pin the charge on the UUP Health Minister, Michael McGimpsey, he could be the highest profile electoral casualty this week. If only the voters knew that, for McGimpsey, Nye Bevan, who delivered the NHS into this world, is as close as it gets to a political hero. An eager slasher and burner he isn’t.
But it is a sad indictment of the Northern political class that there is so little attempt to educate the electorate to the reality that politics, especially in the absence of any significant power to vary tax rates, is about difficult choices.
Economic growth can never hope to keep pace with inflation in the cost of the price of medicines and ever-more-advanced treatments. The options are, in broad terms, few and unpalatable: cut services, restrain pay, amalgamate, or attack the unpopular bureaucrats whose miserable job it actually is to square the circles, to get ever more from — in real terms — ever less.
There is, of course, one other option which applies to many services, not just health: let the private and voluntary sectors take on some of the burden. For all the talk about “rebalancing the economy” few are prepared to admit that fuelling the private sector might involve the public sector having to retreat to the role of regulator rather than provider.
In the North, so consumed by its own issues for so long and, therefore, rather cut off from global trends, what is nowadays an uncontroversial truism elsewhere is regarded as unspeakable Thatcherism, and not just by the self-professed parties of the left.
Decades of this cushiness has long since gnawed away at any sense of Ulster thrift and enterprise. Why take the plunge into the private sector with all its associated risks, young Catholics and Protestants alike quite rationally calculate?
The one politician who has seemed reluctant to do the time warp again is First Minister Peter Robinson. Gingerly, he has suggested the North has to shake itself out of its torpor.
Last year was Robinson’s nadir for sure. Many assumed his career was over in the wake of the scandals surrounding MP wife, Iris; the (unproven) suggestions of shady property deals; and the gasp-inducing loss of his East Belfast citadel.
But staring redundancy in the face — and there could be a parallel here for tens of thousands of others whose salary slips are signed by Her Majesty’s Government — appears to have set him free. With seemingly nothing to lose politically or personally, the frequently testy First Minister who, at one time, revelled in a carefully constructed ultra-hardline image, has proved there is life after apparent political death.
Only a few years ago, his advocacy of integrated education and attendance at Mass — even a Mass for a slain RUC or PSNI officer — would have earned him his own fundamentalists’ contempt. Some might say the person to cast the second stone at Peter Robinson would have been Peter Robinson, his wife, Iris, having cast the first.
The Peter Robinson of 2011 not only looks more comfortable in his own skin but he has succeeded in helping his party make friends with its own electorate, greatly enlarged over the last decade.
The peace process, the Good Friday Agreement and the decommissioning issue, in particular, proved highly traumatic for unionists. Many turned hesitantly to the DUP in disgust, a party they had previously viewed as rabble-rousing and deeply sectarian — an Irish Taliban. Lately, Robinson has, to a considerable extent, made them feel more comfortable in their new allegiance.
Thursday will almost certainly see the DUP-SF duopoly confirmed but there appears to be an irreducible core on both sides of the sectarian divide which is unpersuaded by the apparent modernisation.
Even after a traumatic few months under new UUP leader, Tom Elliott, great shifts of fortune are not expected this week: two or three, perhaps four, seats here and there. The SDLP, helped by Protestant votes in Westminster elections, might struggle to realise all its hopes in its Foyle, South Down and South Belfast heartlands but should perform respectably.
Neither of the parties that like to see themselves as more moderate is helped by the real theme of the election, which is not cuts, but “who is going to be First Minister?”
The DUP and Sinn Féin both love to play up the (actually rather dim) prospect of Martin McGuiness becoming top dog. Even normally sane middle-class unionists become agitated at the thought while some similarly level-headed nationalists cannot resist an opportunity to rile their neighbours.
These two effects only serve to consolidate the DUP and Sinn Féin. Under the original Good Friday rules — subsequently changed by the DUP at St Andrews presumably to create just such a sectarian impulse — the First Minister always came from the largest designated community (unionist or nationalist or neither), not from the largest party.
Hence, Northern assembly elections are always reduced not to competing visions or manifestos but to “Stop/help the ex-IRA man becoming your leader in the eyes of the world”.
In other words: same theme, different setting. Grim, isn’t it? The British and Irish governments, meanwhile, quietly applaud.
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