New UUP leader-designate Steve Aiken seized the initiative last weekend, before an election date had even been set, by pledging to run candidates in all 18 Northern Ireland constituencies. He also said he would move his party to “an unambiguously pro-Remain position.”
By Thursday he was wobbling, with pan-unionist pressure over North Belfast apparently the reason. Aiken told the BBC some of his colleagues had received threats.
During the brief four days it lasted, the UUP’s stance put the DUP under real pressure to explain why it deserves unionist votes anywhere after its disastrous mishandling of Brexit. It was exposed as unable to do so, falling back on demands for tribal solidarity that sounded increasingly angry and desperate. Never has the DUP’s need for a UUP mudguard been so clear.
Opinions differ on whether Aiken always intended to stick to his pledge or if he was playing hardball for an eventual pact or unspoken understanding.
Prevaricating so early has made that question redundant and can only hasten the redundancy of the UUP itself.
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Calling an election threatened expiration of the bill to compensate victims of historical institutional abuse. However, there was no problem finding time to rush through Stormont’s latest annual budget, the third since devolution collapsed.
In almost every political system, passing a budget is considered the primary act of legislative power. It is the origin of parliamentary democracy: monarchs only made themselves accountable to raise money. When the US congress fails to pass a president’s budget, the entire public sector shuts down.
Yet in Northern Ireland we continue to pretend that direct rule budgets do not mean direct rule has arrived in all but name, even if that means torturing abuse victims to preserve the illusion. Whose precious sensitivities are worth this cruel nonsense?
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Indirect rule is causing indigestion in Derry, where it has been confirmed the £105 million city deal agreed this year with Westminster needs devolved ministers to sign off the funding. In a separate development, former assembly speaker Lord Alderdice has said the proposed Magee medical school, held up by the collapse of Stormont, could be approved if “a small bill was passed” in Westminster.
Why not take the same view on the Yorkgate motorway junction, the Casement Park stadium, the north-south electricity interconnector, any of the other £2 billion worth of infrastructure projects currently on limbo, or indeed the Derry city deal?
Answers to that question are becoming too arbitrary to be sustainable.
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A trailer containing nearly five million cigarettes has been seized at the Port of Belfast by customs officers, in a joint operation with Border Force and the PSNI. The trailer was heading to Co Armagh. This highlights the central absurdity of Northern Ireland’s Brexit row: there is already a sea border, a land border, surveillance and security of both and duties payable north-south that are policed east-west. While this hardly means Brexit border issues are not real, everything we are arguing about is essentially a matter of scale, not principle.
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The DUP’s annual conference last weekend was almost comically badly timed, due to Brexit and Stormont developments it did not anticipate yet directly caused.
Sinn Féin’s annual conference, still scheduled to go ahead this month, could be perfectly timed for some free pre-election publicity. Broadcasters will struggle to meet their legal requirement for equal coverage during campaigns - conferences during elections are rare, as no party normally wants them to clash. But these are not normal times and Sinn Féin might welcome the distraction from endless questions about abstentionism.
The conference will witness the deputy leadership challenge from John O’Dowd. This looks set to be spun as reform by splitting the role into deputy leader and northern leader, with Michelle O’Neill retaining the former and Conor Murphy taking the latter.
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There was an anxious moment for Northern Ireland’s film and TV industry when a prequel to Game of Thrones was cancelled. The next day another prequel was commissioned, having been in the works for months without garnering much notice. The decision was widely praised by industry observers in the United States, with the second prequel judged far likelier to succeed. Yet there was relatively little notice paid here. It seems we still do not quite realise the commissioning or cancelling of a television series is the full economic equivalent of opening or closing a factory.
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DUP MP Sammy Wilson tweeted a crowd-pleasing attack on Barclays for banning cash withdrawals from Post Offices - a decision already reversed by the bank last week.
This desperate attempt to change the subject from Brexit got the response it deserved from Richard Bullick, Peter Robinson’s special adviser from 2002 to 2017.
“Pity it wasn’t Steven Barclay” (the Brexit secretary), Bullick replied. “Then the decision could have been quickly reversed.”
Wilson left it at that.
