Irish Examiner view: Ireland waits for Labour majority in UK

Liz Truss’s intervention on Good Friday Agreement shows how difficult it will be for Ireland to deal with the current iteration of a Conservative Party that has clearly lost its way

Prime minister Liz Truss delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham on Wednesday.

Even those addicted to the knockabout fun of politics may find the antics of Britain’s Tory party too wild for genuine enjoyment.

Since its latest leadership struggle was resolved in favour of Liz Truss becoming prime minister, the British economy has endured a crash in the value of sterling, a spike in mortgage rates, and a narrowly averted pensions meltdown. Truss has been resident in 10 Downing Street for one month.

Unsurprisingly, there was a great deal of interest in Truss’s performanceat the Conservative Party conference yesterday, where she was to deliver her first speech as PM. That speech was disrupted by protesters waving a Greenpeace banner, while opponents were swift to take issue with her claim to be the first Prime Minister to attend a comprehensive school.

Truss is not an inspiring orator at the best of times, lacking even Boris Johnson’s bogus fluency, and it was easy yesterday to envisage the Labour Party’s double-digit lead in current opinion polls being converted into a solid majority at the next British election, if not a landslide victory over a Tory party that is stumbling from one disaster to another.

All of which has implications for Ireland in both the short and long term. 

The pension crisis last week across the water, for instance, which was a result of the Truss administration’s mini-budget, does not appear to have affected Irish pensions directly, but the Irish pensions authority is now looking to review the regulatory environment here as a consequence.

The ongoing issue with the Northern Ireland protocol under the Tories was neatly illustrated by former Northern Ireland minister Steve Baker’s strange apology for his stance in negotiations involving Ireland. 

His new prime minister was soon making it clear that Baker was speaking for himself, a rebuke which will hardly inspire confidence among our own diplomats in their future dealings with Britain.

The tenor of those dealings might improve if Labour — in power when the Good Friday Agreement was negotiated — win the next election in Britain. 

Until then, however, Truss’s intervention shows how difficult it will be for Ireland to deal with the current iteration of a Conservative Party which has clearly lost its way.