Opinion

New era of opposition politics dawns at Stormont

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

Newton Emerson
Newton Emerson Newton Emerson

The era of opposition is suddenly upon us - and in politics, five years really is an era. That is how long any opposition parties are required to stay out of power, providing everyone in the executive can hold it together until the next scheduled Stormont election. With three years until the next election of any kind (barring the European referendum) the DUP and Sinn Féin would have plenty of time to get over any residual squeamishness on governing alone together - including fixing the ridiculous fudge over justice. As they do not really have any choice, that is presumably what they will do. The danger for the opposition parties is that they will force the executive to up its game, without having any obvious game plan of their own.

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This week’s twitter gaffe by a party leader came courtesy of Mike Nesbitt, who denied he had ever supported “public money for a mosque in Belfast” by quoting Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. In the fuss that ensued over whether it was appropriate to quote Goebbels, everyone forgot to ask if it was appropriate to dismiss public funding for a mosque - and even to appear upset at being accused of supporting a mosque. It is not as if the UUP has some principled objection to throwing funds at the faithful. It strongly backed the £200m taxpayer bailout of the Presbyterian Mutual Society, for example.

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Last week, before he trolled himself, Mike Nesbitt brilliantly trolled Arlene Foster by proposing that Sinn Féin and the DUP sit beside each other in the assembly. “I won the election,” was Foster’s reply - a spluttering non sequitur, as this neither entitles her to arrange the seating nor explains why she cannot sit beside her Sinn Féin partners. It was ominously reminiscent of “I am the minister”, the phrase Caitriona Ruane used to deploy to as she lost control of education. Sinn Féin was as horrified as Foster by Nesbitt’s suggestion, although it has a better excuse for objecting to the optics of a government bench, as the DUP would certainly expect it to shuffle down.

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Unease continues over ITV’s mini-series The Secret, with a Labour MP telling the Commons that organisations involved in dramatising the Castlerock murders face “questions of accountability and the treatment of victims.” But how would such accountability work? The portrayal of real people is already heavily protected by defamation and industry codes of practice. Rules or laws restricting the portrayal of real events - and bear in mind these events have been proved in court - would be incredibly censorious and slide inevitably towards the sort of oppressive privacy regimes seen in parts of Europe. Of course, that is exactly what some would love to see.

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The end of Sinn Féin’s ‘average industrial wage’ policy has benefited from rather credulous reporting. Readers, viewers and listeners might have been left with the impression that the party had no choice due to changes to Stormont’s expenses system. In fact, Sinn Féin remains perfectly free to maintain its socialist redistribution of income. It has simply chosen not to, using expenses as a pretext to drop a policy it knows has hampered its ability to retain talent. Some reports also failed to note that the expenses system is only being changed because Sinn Féin got caught ripping the behind out of it - an especially curious oversight in the case of the BBC website, as it was BBC Spotlight that broke the expenses scandal.

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Ulster University first proposed closing its crèches in 2008 and succeeded at Jordanstown and Magee in 2013, citing low usage and unsustainable costs due to “changing student lifestyles”. The crèche at Coleraine is run by a private company, albeit in a campus building provided free of charge for the past 42 years. That building has now “reached the end of its lifespan” and must close for “health and safety” reasons, the university has decreed. The company can only find alternative locations off-campus, which defeats the purpose of a student crèche. There is no mention of a crèche at the new £300m central Belfast campus, where space is at a premium. It is striking that all these reasons for closing facilities have led to the closure of all facilities.

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People Before Profit is backing Brexit - or as it prefers to call it, ‘Lexit’, for ‘Left exit’. So keen are the comrades to trot out of the capitalist EU hegemon that if the UK leaves they are vowing to campaign for the Republic to leave as well. In the meantime, the party is assuring supporters that the border would be unaffected because the common travel area and an Anglo-Irish free trade treaty both pre-date the EU. Alas, while we could travel passport-free after Brexit, customs posts would be required. EU membership nullifies and precludes bilateral trade deals and in any case, the 1965 free trade agreement People Before Profit seems to be referring to was only signed by the UK and Ireland to prepare for their joint accession to Europe. Should serious politicians not know this?

newton@irishnews.com