The ‘Swiss model’ is entering Northern Ireland’s Brexit lexicon.
Switzerland avoids border checks by aligning its plant and animal regulations with the EU. DUP economy minister Diane Dodds seemed frozen in the headlights when this was raised by the SDLP and Alliance in the assembly but both she and Arlene Foster have since said they are not averse to idea.
Beyond the details of this example the overall Swiss model involves endlessly negotiating your relationship with the EU, issue by issue. Swiss politics become dominated by these protracted technical debates, in which alignment is the only realistic choice. Northern Ireland lacks even that hypothetical autonomy, as the UK must shadow the EU to mitigate the sea border for us. This is the rough outline of our Brexit future: not so much a Swiss model as begging London for a Swiss roll.
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A report from Ulster University has found Northern Ireland’s entire education system to be a divisive mess that needs rebuilt from top to bottom. Covid is putting further radical ideas on the agenda, including scrapping GCSEs.
The hopelessness of expecting Stormont to deliver change on such a scale is highlighted by Peter Weir’s pledge to let children start school one year later if they were born prematurely in the months before June.
The DUP education minister says this simple tweak of admissions rules will be a “major priority within the current mandate”.
That is no guarantee of delivery, so obsessed is the education bureaucracy with managing everything by pupil age.
Weir’s Sinn Féin predecessor, John O’Dowd, had to abandon an identical pledge in 2015 because he ran out of legislative time before the following year’s assembly election. It is now the same length of time to the next election.
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In a move straight from the Donald Trump play-book, Sinn Féin has complained about this year’s canvass of the electoral register - a legally required update, last performed in 2013.
Of course, the party also complained in 2013, when it claimed voters were being disenfranchised by form-filling. This year it adds the government is “planning” to “suppress the democratic rights of citizens” ahead of “next year’s historic assembly election”.
Canvasses are not performed by the government but by the independent Electoral Office. Frequency is set in legislation at once every ten years. A canvass was planned last year until Covid intervened. Next year clashes with the election and the following year misses the deadline, so that leaves this year. No grievance-peddling conspiracy theory is required to explain it.
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Councils will be able to set different levels of business and domestic rates under legislation to be introduced by Sinn Féin finance minister Conor Murphy. With the decline of the high street, logic points to households picking up more of the bill. It will be interesting to see how councillors handle this unpopular responsibility. One improvement not announced is letting councils vary business rates within their areas, to shift the burden from less prosperous town centres. The creation of the super-councils six years ago made this reform more urgent, yet there is still no sign of it.
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Imagine a new greenway route was identified through unused land in west Belfast, requiring only minor access work for most of its length and winning support from residents, community groups and the council. Then imagine the Department for Infrastructure said it had to run along the hard shoulder of the M1, while still offering no credible budget or timeline to build it.
This is what has happened to the proposed Holywood greenway, which the department has absurdly re-routed onto the Sydenham bypass, ridiculing policy direction from SDLP minister Nichola Mallon. Days later, Mallon penned a Belfast Telegraph column that concluded: “Change is coming. So let’s get on with it.”
It looked more like a message to her officials than to the public.
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A fixed link to Scotland has made the news again, although this time Boris Johnson cannot be accused of staging a distraction. Despite headlines such as the Guardian’s “Rail bosses plan to build Northern Ireland to Scotland tunnel”, the ‘plan’ is merely an engineering industry submission to an independent review.
Conservative MP Simon Hoare, chair of Westminster’s Northern Ireland affairs committee, made further headlines by saying “the trains could be pulled by an inexhaustible herd of unicorns”.
He may have been joking. Then again, he told an event in London on Tuesday that Northern Ireland’s access to the EU and the UK means it is entering “an absolute golden age”.
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An online petition to have Stephen Nolan taken off air has been strongly condemned by the National Union of Journalists, whose Belfast branch called it “yet another toxic campaign against working journalists in Northern Ireland.”
The petition seems largely provoked by Nolan using loyalist blogger Jamie Bryson as a guest, which makes the NUJ’s statement doubly pointed: its Belfast branch has been excoriating about Bryson in the past and tried to block him joining the union, as bloggers are entitled to do.
There is further irony in how many republicans have been calling for Bryson to be silenced. Would they prefer him to be voiced by an actor?
