We’re in a holding pattern in more ways than one. ‘Holding pattern’ usually refers to a plane going round in circles before it can land or, as an idiom, to useless or unproductive activity. Politically, and for that matter economically, that’s what we’re engaged in.
In Britain and Ireland everyone in politics is waiting for an election. In the Republic they’ve got three elections to look forward to: council and European in June and a Dáil election, maybe October, maybe next February. In the north we conduct our own entirely separate election in parallel with a British general election, the outcome of which no-one here votes for.
Pending the Irish and British elections there will be no major developments here. Everyone waits to see if all the indications are correct and Labour will sweep to victory and inaugurate a stable, rational government after the chaos of the last decade and the austerity of the previous 14 years. Equally, people will wait to see if Sinn Féin can make good all the poll predictions and lead a government of change or if the migration crisis knocks the party sideways and the old civil war parties can block change.
In this atmosphere the only people who don’t realise we’re in a holding pattern are the DUP who vigorously engage in useless and unproductive activity.
Currently they’re getting in a lather about the Rwanda Act being disapplied in the north which everyone, including the DUP, knew would be the case.
The Conservatives are bored with them. Yeah, we’ll appeal the Belfast High Court’s judgement, but the fact is Rishi Sunak and his ministers don’t care how long an appeal takes (which they’ll lose) because, guess what, they don’t give tuppence how many asylum seekers go to the north or on to the south. They only care about them coming to Britain.
It’s the same with Sunak’s electronic travel authorisation system. There’ll be no checks at the British border in Ireland because the British don’t care who comes north, only who comes to Britain. So Sammy Wilson is correct, but not in the way he thinks, that there will be, as he says, a “people border as well as a goods border” in the Irish Sea.
But wait: none of this matters because one action Starmer is certain to take is to repeal the shameful and obnoxious Rwanda Act because it contravenes the Human Rights Act and the ECHR. He also intends to make a deal on migration with the EU which Brexiteer Sunak won’t.
The British don’t care who comes north, only who comes to Britain. So Sammy Wilson is correct, but not in the way he thinks, that there will be, as he says, a “people border as well as a goods border” in the Irish Sea
Therefore a lot of the noise the DUP is making is purely performative to try to recover some ground they’ve lost because of their support for the hardest Brexit. For some reason they can’t see that the small boats crisis is one of the results of the type of Brexit they supported along with the 4% loss in UK GDP and 15% drop in trade.
We’re in a holding pattern in another respect. All the internal DUP schemozzle since their electoral fortunes began to decline in 2019 allows the party to avoid the big ticket item – the future of unionism.
Their behaviour over the last five years has contributed to undermining the idea of devolved administration here and allowing their supporters to regard the arrangements as temporary and disposable or replaceable, a staging post - ironically what republicans have always said.
Brexit and the DUP’s involvement have distracted the party from the challenge Peter Robinson posed on various occasions from 2011 when he got a look at the census results and the foreseeable inevitable rapid decline in unionist voters. He elaborated a couple of times on the need for “a process of negotiations” and “who would be involved in negotiating”.
Unionists, including leading figures in his own party, repudiated his remarks mainly because they believed that he was implicitly accepting there would be Irish reunification.
A decade on there is no unionist leader with the vision or political nous to take up the challenge Robinson laid down, which is essentially to plan for the future of the people who vote for the largest unionist party. Ranting about the Windsor Framework and the Rwanda Act is the easy stuff.
