Opinion

Patrick Murphy: Election will be little more than a political fashion show - Strictly Come Voting

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy is an Irish News columnist and former director of Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education.

The 2020 New Decade New Approach, negotiated by Simon Coveney and Julian Smith, promised “a new action plan on waiting times.” Photo: Niall Carson/PA Wire.
The 2020 New Decade New Approach, negotiated by Simon Coveney and Julian Smith, promised “a new action plan on waiting times.” Photo: Niall Carson/PA Wire. The 2020 New Decade New Approach, negotiated by Simon Coveney and Julian Smith, promised “a new action plan on waiting times.” Photo: Niall Carson/PA Wire.

It is increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that the forthcoming assembly election is largely irrelevant.

A rather sad assumption, you rightly say, but there is ample evidence to support it.

Should Stormont be re-established, it will merely stagger to the next sectarian stand-off before someone walks away again.

It has been closed for 35 per cent of its 22 years, a figure likely to rise with its current suspension.

(Stormont’s Latin motto might be St Augustine’s Solvitur ambulando: “it is solved by walking” - although he meant something different.)

Even if Stormont resumes, it will continue with that administrative farce, whereby sectarian parties confront each other across the floor, even though they form the same government.

They criticise each other’s ministerial performances, but the five executive parties are effectively one large (conservative) party. (Vote for the Stormont Party: we deliver division.)

It includes the centre right (SF, SDLP and Alliance), the right (UUP) and the hard right (DUP). That mirrors the range of opinion in the Tory party. There is no left wing opposition (indeed, like the old Stormont, there is no opposition at all) and thus no accountable government.

As a result, almost 500,000 people are waiting for surgery or to see a consultant. That’s almost one third of our total population. Voting will not change that shameful statistic.

The 2020 New Decade New Approach (NDNA) promised “a new action plan on waiting times.” (They never revealed the plan, but it was presumably to make waiting times longer and, in fairness, that’s what they delivered.)

Most people welcomed NDNA at the time. This column said it was a sham, which somehow underestimated its sheer uselessness. It promised to focus on ending sectarianism (that’s going well) and to implement an anti-poverty strategy, which was shamefully sidelined.

So our election will be little more than a political fashion show. Think of it as Strictly Come Voting, in which stars dazzle with their fancy political footwork and sectarian sequins, in an escapist extravaganza of worthless post-election promises. Then the television news comes on and we are back in the real world.

I don’t want to vote for flag-bedecked dancers. I want to vote for people like nurses, who (unlike Stormont) do not ask you to declare your religion at the door, nor bore you with their bigotry.

I want to vote for those typified by Belfast’s Bredagh GAA Club. During lockdown, they joined with other sporting bodies to distribute food worth £70,000 to elderly and vulnerable people.

I want to vote for those running Foyle Foodbank, which fed 15,000 people in 2021 (up from 3,800 in 2016) and the lady who told them: “I don’t care if you have food for me, as long as you’ve got it for my children.”

None of those people will walk away when it suits them.

This paper’s recent survey showed that the electorate’s major concerns are health, the economy, the protocol, employment, education and housing. Only about 3 per cent thought constitutional issues were important but, remarkably, that’s what Stormont’s power-sharing is based on: flags.

It comes from a theory called corporatism, which argues that society consists of interest groups (in our case nationalists and unionists) while ignoring the social and economic inequality of the haves and have-nots.

The theory is Catholic in origin, as illustrated by Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. It was adopted by the SDLP in the 1980s (followed by SF in the 1990s) and it underpins the Good Friday Agreement (GFA).

Corporatism avoids class-based issues of left-right politics, which is why the UK and USA supported the GFA. They did not want real, and certainly not radical, politics here. That has allowed Stormont to effectively collapse the NHS (how else can you interpret a 500,000 waiting list?) for the benefit of the private sector.

It also explains why the forthcoming election will make little difference to the lives of ordinary people, no matter which dancer wins.