Opinion

Newton Emerson: Bombardier dispute could turn into a massive headache for Donald Trump

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.

The row between Boeing and Bombardier could threaten jobs in Belfast. Picture by Matt Bohill
The row between Boeing and Bombardier could threaten jobs in Belfast. Picture by Matt Bohill The row between Boeing and Bombardier could threaten jobs in Belfast. Picture by Matt Bohill

All hope is not lost for Bombardier in Belfast, despite how little London can do against America’s most important manufacturer. Boeing employs more people in the UK than Bombardier so British threats to cancel US defence contracts are bluster. However, thanks to the same interconnectedness in the aviation industry, half the supply chain for Bombardier’s C-Series jet is in the United States, where it has the potential to support up to 23,000 jobs.

The equipment used to make C-Series wings in Belfast, for example, comes from three major aerospace suppliers in Washington state, where Boeing is headquartered. That is more likely to make Americans think twice once the political calculations get under way - a stage the dispute process has barely reached.

If the matter ever crosses Donald Trump’s desk, he will face a more complicated decision than ‘America first’. A key part of his political platform is reorienting the North American Free Trade Area away from low-wage Mexico towards high-tech Canada. Talks on that only began last month, yet already Canada is issuing credible threats of an aviation trade war. Can even Trump laugh off such a fiasco?

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Stormont talks reconvened in the first week of September in an upbeat mood, crashed the following week to a downbeat mood and have returned this week to an upbeat mood, according to reports. Green Party MLA and former deputy leader Clare Bailey has criticised the media for a lack of substance in this coverage of the deadlock, noting there has been no substantive change in what Sinn Féin and the DUP are actually saying - but that criticism misses the point. Both parties have clearly known the outline of a deal since March. It will be forced, as usual, by an October budget deadline stretched out to Christmas. So in the meantime, mood swings are really all there is report.

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Water charging is the dog that has not barked in the present Stormont crisis. We are now told the five-year suspension of Stormont from 2002 ended when the DUP was threatened with joint authority at the 2006 St Andrew’s talks. That claim was self-serving nonsense from the DUP then, as it is from Sinn Féin now. Water charging was the main pressure point on both parties, shamelessly applied by secretaries of state throughout the period. Presumably it is not back on the agenda today because that would take the shine off the £1 billion DUP-Tory deal, while nationalists parties do not want to be seen raising the possibility. Still, how odd that it has not been mentioned at all when restoring devolution supposedly depends on the threat of a direct rule budget within weeks.

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Representatives of 11 trade unions have delivered a letter to Department of Health permanent secretary Richard Pengelly, accusing him of running a “sham” public consultation exercise into £70 million of planned cuts.

Where have the comrades been for the past 20 years? Public consultation exercises are always a sham - they are never run without a pre-ordained outcome in mind, ever. The department responded to the letter by calling it: “an important contribution to the public consultation exercise.” This is the civil service equivalent of being laughed at to your face.

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The Department of Education has reissued its warning from earlier this month that schools face £100 million of “cost pressures” over the rest of this financial year - a figure now updated to £105 million. If Northern Ireland reduced administrative costs per pupil to English and Welsh levels it would save £430 million a year but apparently that route is not an option. Permanent secretary Derek Baker insists that even if he shut the entire department “I’d still be shy of £105m.” He’d be nearly there though, without cutting school staff, special needs and essential building maintenance as planned. Shutting the department is not as crazy an idea as civil servants seem to believe. The new single Education Authority makes it look almost redundant, apart from providing ministerial levers, which no minister is currently grasping. In England, where councils perform the Education Authority’s role, shutting the Department for Education and not replacing it with anything has occasionally been suggested by reformers.

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A familiar name has popped up in Brexit negotiations on the Irish border at the European Parliament. Polish MEP Danuta Hubner, chair of the parliament’s committee on constitutional affairs, was the European Commission’s regional policy commissioner in 2008 when she was appointed to head the EU’s first ever task force on Northern Ireland. Her widely anticipated reported dismissed DUP and Sinn Féin lobbying for EU-level recognition of our ‘conflict’ and instead told Stormont to move on by supporting business investment and “ending dependence on the public sector.” Obviously, the report was never mentioned again. It is good to know that somewhere, at least, a grown-up is still in charge.

newton@irishnews.com