Governments collapse when support is withdrawn from them.
In March 1972, for example, Northern Ireland’s Parliament was prorogued when the UK government (which had had an arm’s length relationship with it since June 1921) concluded that a unionist government would no longer have primacy when it came to security. Brian Faulkner’s cabinet agreed that a government without control over policing/military affairs was a government in name only and so refused to provide government in any other department.
Just over two years later the Faulkner/SDLP/Alliance coalition collapsed because it became clear that it didn’t enjoy the support of a majority of the electorate: meaning that Faulkner, again, had to tender his resignation to a UK government. Between then and 1998 the ‘normal’ in local politics was the search for an agreement and a form of coalition into which unionism, nationalism, loyalism, republicanism and the UK and Irish governments would buy into. And for a brief period after April 1998 it looked as though we had found an agreement.
So, let us skip from the ‘normal’ of my lifetime—which was a long period of violence, instability and failure to agree—to the ‘normal’ for Megan, my eldest daughter. Her first vote was in the election in 2017, for an assembly which didn’t meet until almost three years later and then collapsed in February this year when the DUP withdrew its first minister. Her next votes were for what turned out to be the chaos of the 2017 and 2019 general elections: while her most recent was in May, for another assembly which has yet to meet (and seems likely to require another early election to facilitate a reboot).
Her ’normal’ is not as brutal as my previous ‘normal’ and she has, thankfully, been spared the terrorism which my generation took for granted for almost 30 years. Yet her ‘normal’—in terms of local politics—has been very similar to mine: namely, a seeming inability to produce and sustain a form of consensual government which the vast majority of us can jointly endorse. Even those who say they have rejected the old ‘normal’ have singularly failed to replace it with a new ‘normal’ which is measurably different to the divisions which have bedevilled us since the late 1960s.
There is now a significant section of unionism/loyalism which doesn’t seem to care if the assembly survives. I remember that same sense of indifference during the Sunningdale crisis, when the UUP/DUP/Vanguard, along with the muscle of the UDA and others brought down an assembly without having prepared the alternative.
Those determined to kill off the present assembly (and there’s probably greater support for that option than the NIO and government imagine—even if the protocol dilemma is resolved) have, like their predecessors, no alternative to put in its place.
Meanwhile, nationalism and republicanism—even the softer elements—are increasingly miffed by what they perceive as unionism’s role-reversal crisis. Let me explain. An old friend, who has supported (but never joined) the SDLP since it was formed, told me he was now astonished to hear so many voices within unionism complaining that they have become second-class citizens. “Does this post-agreement unionist generation understand irony,” he wondered: “Do they understand what the civil rights campaign was all about. Do they think we should just have stayed at the back of the bus?”
That utter lack of understanding, let alone empathy, between unionism and nationalism was my ‘normal’. It is still the ‘normal’ for Megan’s generation. It strikes me as very unlikely that any understanding or empathy between the two will emerge. It’s not so much a case of naked antagonism as it is of utter indifference. Both now accept that the endgame process is under way (by which I mean the approach of a border poll), meaning that there’s really no point in focusing on a new modus vivendi. I’m aware that my concerns about a border poll are dismissed by elements of unionism. So be it. But I still think it needs to be prepared for all eventualities.
I know, too, that elements of the ‘middle ground’ believe me to be overly pessimistic about the emergence of a ‘new way of doing politics’ in Northern Ireland. Again, so be it. I’ve been told since the peace negotiations got underway in the early 1990s that a breakthrough for new-generation politics was imminent: yet thirty years on the breakthrough has yet to reach the it-really-does-need-to-be-taken-seriously stage. And that’s because the middle ground voters themselves acknowledge the increased hold the constitutional question now has on devolution.
For now, though, all attention will be focused on yet another internal Conservative crisis. As before, when May replaced Cameron and then Johnson replaced her, neither Sunak nor Truss will resolve the crisis. And nor, I suspect, will the next prime minister give the DUP what it needs. But I’ll return to that issue in September.
