Opinion

Newton Emerson: As bedroom tax bites, where is the policy meant to help claimants?

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.

Russell Court on Belfast's Lisburn Road where a fire safety review found concerns about Block B. Picture by Mal McCann
Russell Court on Belfast's Lisburn Road where a fire safety review found concerns about Block B. Picture by Mal McCann Russell Court on Belfast's Lisburn Road where a fire safety review found concerns about Block B. Picture by Mal McCann

The so-called bedroom tax is starting to bite in Northern Ireland, causing the SDLP to ask what happened to Sinn Féin’s claim that nobody would ever have to pay it.

What happened was the 2015 Fresh Start agreement, which protected current claimants only up to 2020. The breathing space was to be used to build more small social housing units, enabling the bedroom tax to do what it is meant to do, by letting people downsize to more appropriate properties.

This was a good, joined-up policy - better than its implementation in Britain. The failure is not that new claimants have to pay but that new properties have not been built.

The scale of that failure is shown by the evacuation of 60 tenants from a south Belfast apartment block over fire concerns. Russell Court, in use as social housing for a quarter of a century, still represents a huge chunk of small-unit provision in Belfast. The system cannot cope with its sudden loss - residents have been told they may end up in hostels, while the waiting list overall will be significantly affected.

**

Trouble really does come in threes. After abortion and same-sex marriage the DUP is facing another UK-wide social policy humiliation, this time over legalising cannabis oil to treat childhood epilepsy, among other conditions.

The case of Northern Ireland boy Billy Caldwell is receiving national coverage because of his mother Charlotte’s campaign and because it highlights the UK’s double standards in supplying half the world’s cannabis oil - including from a farm owned by the drugs minister’s husband - while still banning it at home.

London newspapers are now reporting that the DUP is the only party in Northern Ireland against legalisation, despite initially promising help to Charlotte Caldwell. Worse still for the DUP, she is accusing it of hypocrisy for denying her disabled son life-saving medicine while taking an uncompromisingly pro-life stance on disability and abortion.

If legalising cannabis is the next social policy battleground, the DUP is the bad guy already.

**

Sinn Féin’s Gerry Kelly has met Prince Charles and challenged unionists to make a comparable gesture, raising the under-examined question of what that might be. Strictly speaking, there is no equivalent figure for unionists to meet - unless the next candidate for the Irish presidency is known and unopposed. Kelly referred to Martin McGuinness’s historic 2012 handshake with the Queen, saying his encounter was in that vein. But unionist leaders have often met Irish presidents - in fact, Peter Robinson and President Higgins were among the seven people in the room when McGuinness first met the Queen.

There is a sense that these things are not quite the same, but to what extent is that just because Sinn Féin makes a fuss about it?

**

YouTube removed loyalist band parade videos for supporting proscribed terrorist organisations, presumably following republican complaints, then put many of them back up again after unionist complaints. Confusion arose because a number of bands use the title ‘Red Hand Defenders’, although they were all formed long before the terrorist organisation of that name.

Nevertheless, most people would consider it decent to change a name if it was adopted - even by complete coincidence - by a murder gang. Among the numerous private and public bodies to drop the name ‘Isis’ as soon as it became contentious were a French rock band and an American heavy metal band.

**

Mystery surrounds another joint statement from Sinn Féin, the SDLP, Alliance and the Greens, fretting over the impact of Brexit on human rights.

The statement calls for “an explicit guarantee relating to the European Convention on Human Rights” - although the convention and its court are nothing to the do with the EU.

The statement also demands that the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights be “retained in UK law or at least as it applies to Northern Ireland” - although the Charter is not in UK law, only applies to EU law and the UK has an opt-out from its domestic application to EU law.

The Bill of Rights campaign showed that some parts of the rights sector in Northern Ireland are prepared to make up dangers to serve what they see as the greater good. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as they say in Strasbourg (headquarters of the Council of Europe, not the EU.)

**

The Orange Order is happy to bask in the media spotlight over Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s visit to its Belfast headquarters, yet it is hiding from queries about a ludicrous application by a new lodge in north Belfast to march through a mixed residential area, where there has never been an Orange parade before. Union flags appeared on lampposts in the Mountcoole neighbourhood last week in a prelude to this territorial pot-stirring. The area’s mainly middle-class homeowners will be too frightened to protest. However, the brethren still have a problem. Their proposed route includes some of the steepest streets in Northern Ireland, of a gradient the modern plebeian will struggle to climb unaided. Should this attempted act of intimidation proceed past the drawn blinds of suburbia, marchers might just hear the distant laughter of their betters - for a Protestant, the most devastating residents’ protest of them all.

newton@irishnews.com