Overturning in the widening gyre

The Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland is a bad answer to a question that only has bad answers – that question being: “where should we put this Brexit border that 56 percent of the people of Northern Ireland didn’t want in the first place”?

In a similar vein the news that the Prime Minister is “not ruling out” the possibility of overriding it could be greeted with the question: “is this a bad idea, or an even worse idea”? In fact, it could be greeted with another question altogether: “does the PM mean it, or is this just another vague gesture designed to shore up his shaky support base”?

To take the second question first: remember, we’ve seen not just vague gestures but firm promises overturned by the PM – so much so he reminds me of Yeats’s falcon, turning and turning in the widening gyre.

Promises such as his assurance to unionists that there would be no border in the Irish Sea. Which brings us back to our first question: “where should we put this Brexit border that 56 percent of the people of Northern Ireland didn’t want in the first place”?

Unionists of a certain stripe (DUP or TUV supporters) are adamant that the Brexit border they called for is now the greatest threat to the Union, precisely because the PM put it where they didn’t expect it to go. They wanted a Brexit border, but not there.

Yet the only other real option available was for it to go on the Island of Ireland – ie, reinforcing, even re-inaugurating the current border, between Northern Ireland and the Republic. You can see why, on the surface, this would have seemed an attractive option to some unionists – how better to secure the union than by reinforcing the border? And if this was expressly opposed by 56 percent of people in Northern Ireland, well, too bad; it was the decision of the people of the UK as a whole, and the rest of us (‘Republicans and Remoaners’ perhaps?) would just have to lump it (whatever anybody later said about the consent principle).

Unfortunately(!) though, there’s another factor that has to be considered here. The Northern Ireland Act of 1998, following the principles of the Good Friday Agreement, says that Northern Ireland will remain in the UK as long as “a majority” want it to. It doesn’t say the Union depends on the consent of ‘the majority community’, as if such a thing existed: rather, it depends on the consent of the majority of the people. Plural. That is, over 50 percent of those who turn up and vote in a referendum, whatever their nation or denomination.

Now, my mathematics is not great, but even I can tell you 56 percent is more than 50 percent. So here’s another question: is imposing a Brexit border around Northern Ireland, against the expressed wishes of 56 percent of the people living there, likely to a) increase the proportion of people content with Northern Ireland as it is, or b) increase the proportion unhappy with it?

If it does come to a referendum on the border, you won’t preserve the union, if that is your goal, by intensifying the loyalty of the already loyal, or demanding unionist unity. It won’t be a matter of denomination, ‘The Unionist Community’ versus ‘The Nationalist Community’; it will be a matter of who can form the bigger combination of voters on the day. Which means – and this applies to nationalists just as much as unionists – you’re going to have to win over some of the growing community of Others.

Perhaps, in the end, it is the habit of choosing denomination over combination that has to be overturned. Perhaps if we dial down the rhetoric we’ll be able to learn to hear each other – not so much the falcon hearing the falconer as neighbour in conversation with neighbour, working out together how best to address the problems (and from the cost of living crisis, the waiting list crisis, the housing crisis to the climate crisis we’re not short of them) that we face in common.

MM

23 April 2022

Battle Stations

Sir Jeffrey Donaldson has told voters that the election on 5 May will be a “battle for Northern Ireland”.

But elections aren’t battles. Indeed, that’s rather the point, is it not?

Of course, Sir Jeffrey is speaking metaphorically here, and moreover, it is admittedly unfair to single out his remark when Northern Irish politics is full of these sorts of references, and has been for decades, if not centuries. And that not just from unionist politicians: I write this a couple of days after members of a dissident Irish Republican organisation – the one that shot Lyra McKee – took it upon themselves to parade around with masks and guns, and attack the PSNI with petrol bombs.

Yet there is a pointedness, a force to the metaphor of the election as ‘battle’ that calls for consideration.

There’s a line in a book by René Girard that keeps coming back to me:

“Once aroused, the urge to violence triggers certain physical changes that prepare men’s bodies for battle. This set toward violence lingers on; it should not be regarded as a simple reflex that ceases with the removal of the initial stimulus”.

Men’s and women’s bodies, one should add. This ‘set toward violence’ is also a ‘set toward each other’, of course. And boy has it ‘lingered on’ in Northern Ireland, in the form of the obsessive repetition of the ‘two-communities-in-conflict’ model.

It’s a zero-sum, binary reduction machine; it sets you towards one neighbour in one way, and another neighbour in another, depending on how you denominate them.

And it is more to do with denomination than democracy.

We have let the ‘set toward violence’ linger long enough. It’s time to move beyond a politics of denomination toward a democracy that is about combination, about coming together with others to get on with solving the myriad problems we face – whatever our denomination (or nation, or orientation, for that matter). Problems such as fixing the health service; making sure our children get the best possible education; addressing fuel poverty; tackling the cost of living and the housing crisis; achieving social justice for those still facing systemic discrimination; finally implementing the long-discussed Green New Deal.

But to achieve that, we’re going to need to build a green new democracy.

Democracy shouldn’t be, can’t be reduced to a ‘battle for (or against) Northern Ireland’, where ‘Northern Ireland’ is some abstraction, the only significant feature of which is where the border lies. We don’t live in an abstraction; we live in a neighbourhood.

And it’s time we got our heads together with our neighbours and got on with the hard, patient, laborious work of rising to the challenges we face in common.

MM

20 April 2022

Dead cats and criminals

16 April 2022

Boris Johnson broke the law. The Government are now trying to change the law so that asylum seekers are deemed to have done so too.

“Let us suppose you are losing an argument,” wrote a pundit in the Daily Telegraph in 2013. “The facts are overwhelmingly against you, and the more people focus on the reality the worse it is for you and your case”. His advice: “Your best bet in those circumstances is to performe a manoeuvre that a great campaigner describes as ‘throwing a dead cat on the table, mate’.” [The London Economic]

The idea is that everyone in the room will suddenly stop thinking about the weakness of your position and start talking about the dead cat on the table. The pundit? Boris Johnson, of course.

So it is likely he or his circle knew exactly what they were doing when, just after Johnson had received a fine for law breaking, they announced the plan to deport newly arrived migrants to Rwanda. Reliably, practically everyone remotely liberal, progressive or left-leaning has, quite rightly, condemned this outrageous, impractical, and expensive scheme.

The problem for Johnson is, if your table is already covered in feline corpses, throwing on another has a much reduced effect. The law of diminishing returns has kicked in. We are perfectly capable of simultaneously walking the walk of condemning the Government for their ostentatiously callous approach to those seeking asylum, while chewing the gum of reminding everyone that Johnson is a law-breaker.

So let us remind ourselves that Johnson is a law breaker – the first Prime Minister ever to be in that unenviable position. As the Prime Minsiter who brought back Priti Patel, who had earlier been forced to resign over off-the-books meeting with Israeli officials, he is also responsible for an exponential instensification of the ‘hostile environment’ for migrants.

That hostility has reached its apogee in this hare-brained Rwandan scheme – which comes just after the Government recently boasted of its ‘generosity’ towards Ukrainian refugees. Campaigners have pointed out the implicit potential racism in offering homes for Ukrainians (good as that is in itself) while signally failing to do so for, say, the Afghans who only a few months ago were the objects of UK Government ‘generosity’.

But that idea of ‘generosity’, aside from being apparently somewhat short lived, is incredibly selective – and that is where we get to the real heart of the matter.

Generosity is not the same as justice.

The Government have set up a few narrowly drawn refugee ‘Resettlement’ schemes – for Syrians, Afghans and now Ukrainians already accorded refugee status – which they then trumpet as ‘generous’ – while at the same time literally criminalising anyone who arrives seeking asylum (ie, asking to be accorded refugee status) outside the scope of those schemes.

Arrive by boat or lorry, and without all your papers in order, and under the Government’s plans, you will be held to have broken the law – that is, if the Nationality and Borders Bill is enacted.

Under the Bill, anyone arriving by one of the informal routes, like a cross-channel boat, will be defined as ‘illegal’. According to the new scheme, to add to this, men (only men, mind you) arriving by boat will be turned straight around and sent thousands of miles off to Rwanda. Why? Well, as Johnson explained, our compassion may be infinite “but our capacity is not”. Remarkable that Rwanda (GDP $10.5bn) appears to have more ‘capacity’ than the UK (GDP $2.7 TRILLION). To say nothing of the fact that Rwanda is already home to about 4 times more refugees per capita than the UK. But then of course, we are going to be using UK public money to buy this service, sell the migrants on to the lowest bidder, as it were, so perhaps capacity is not the issue.

Perhaps ‘compassion’ is not the issue either; perhaps this is a matter of injustice, cloaked by a redefinition of the very concept of asylum. The Nationalities and Borders Bill, after all, effectively says that your claim for asylum will not be judged on the basis of whether you have a well-founded fear of persecution (the UN definition), but on your method of travel.

And that really is criminal.

Maurice Macartney

16 April 2022

The Return of the COO!

I have decided to revive this old blog because there is too much going on in UK and Northern Ireland politics to stay silent.

My aim is to post a few short pieces on a range of issues that seem that are crying out for a response – from the Westminster Government’s announcement that they are planning to deport asylum seekers and other migrants to Rwanda to the arguments over the post-Brexit Protocol.

My hope is to try to clarify my own thinking on these matters, and perhaps to contribute, however marginally, to a more democratic, inclusive and equitable way of thinking about and doing politics here.

Let me know what you think.

Maurice

16 April 2022

@Jointhecoo