Opinion

Main British focus is on spending and the past

British Prime Minister David Cameron (right) welcomes Taoiseach Enda Kenny to 10 Downing Street in London. Picture by Jonathan Brady/PA Wire
British Prime Minister David Cameron (right) welcomes Taoiseach Enda Kenny to 10 Downing Street in London. Picture by Jonathan Brady/PA Wire British Prime Minister David Cameron (right) welcomes Taoiseach Enda Kenny to 10 Downing Street in London. Picture by Jonathan Brady/PA Wire

As this is written, George Osborne is telling the UK that some ministers have agreed to his savage 30 per cent cut in spending over the next four years.

But work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith is said to be refusing a squeeze of his much-heralded universal credit that George fancies might make up for the cuts denied him by those rebellious Lords, including DUP peers.

The DUP part in the Lords rebellion was presented later as in defence of the poor and vulnerable, in keeping with their attitude all along.

Back when Sinn Féin and the SDLP first dug in against benefit cuts to general unionist disapproval, DUP intentions were not so clear. Now, however, it is time to play up real and imaginary class distinctions to score off ‘posh’ Mike Nesbitt.

In the middle of a weekend of Tory cabinet tensions, who walked into the Cameron sitting-room but P Robinson and M McGuinness, in search of money to melt like sweet-smelling fudge across their dog-eared deal. An irritated Dave dispenses entirely with the charm. One screen-grab of his thinned-lip face was enough to confirm the updated state of play re Downing Street and pestiferous Northern Ireland.

The Stormont power-sharers have been told repeatedly that Number Ten is no longer a welcoming address. There is unlikely to have ever been hidden warmth for former IRA leader McGuinness and Peter Robinson’s daydreams about Westminster relevance fizzled out like the prospect of a hung parliament, displaced by what looks like Cameron distaste for the illiberal DUP. That Stormont slap-down for the vote on same sex marriage may have scarcely registered, but won’t be appreciated.

Official British interest in this place is focused now, though, on spending, and on slowing up disclosure of security force misdeeds.

So government intentions will in general be couched in formal terms, decorated with occasional assurances that unionism is dear to Tories too, perhaps not quite as in the minds of Northern Ireland unionists.

What that might mean, to non-politician and non-commentator unionists, is too rarely explored, with only an occasional glimpse from an unusual angle across the scorched earth of history. As in Linda Ervine’s painstaking account in these pages yesterday of how she realised Irish belonged to her too.

What people think and why they think it is the stuff of life, politics, media old and new. Round it goes in a perfect circle, or one circle inside another. Do media accounts mislead, simplify and feed prejudice, fail to ask hard questions about power and influence? Back away from economics leaving it to supposed experts? Do lives as lived shape politics? Well, clearly politics shape lives, the directions they take and the attitudes that decide those directions.

The people washing up on Mediterranean beaches and walking in exhaustion through border after border, packed into lorries and running in the dark beside trains, have had their lives disrupted by wars propelled by politics.

Those wars are fuelled by politicians in our world, the privileged world in the margin of which we here loiter, preoccupied in ways that the shivering, shoeless families sleeping on damp cardboard in Calais would find hard to understand.

At least, that is one picture of preoccupations here. It might be wrong, or mostly wrong. News organisations have too few staff to discover the thoughts behind attitudes - unless the outcome is dramatic, tragic or bloody or scandalous. Pollsters and polls take up the slack, in their maddening, bitty, sometimes fascinating way. A sizeable exercise underpinned that joint BBCNI/RTE cross-border programme last week that – on a brief, appalled viewing - wasted the time of many with, possibly, interesting things to say. The poll itself deserved better.

The similarity in cross-border attitudes on single-sex marriage, and provision for abortion, might cheer up anyone who hopes people north and south are more alike than different. Why did people who chose ‘Don’t know’ as their identity over British/Irish/Northern Irish/Other score highest on satisfaction with their state of health? The Antrim/Newtownabbey council area came top repeatedly, 14 per cent ahead of mid and east Antrim for example as most satisfied with their ‘love life.’ Causeway, Coast and Glens people were most dissatisfied, two per cent more than...bustling Belfast.

Those who described themselves as Protestant Northern Irish topped the category of ‘very comfortable’ with a close family member marrying someone of a different skin colour. Derry, I noticed, repeatedly came tops in ‘neither comfortable nor uncomfortable.’

These things might well not strike you as remarkable, others surely will. Worth a very long read.