Sunday and the Week’s Media Stupid Statements

A busy week and weekend. First up from someone who reappeared for the first time on this post in a while last week we have another example of seeming lack of self-awareness:

I studied the selection of abusive tweets about me.

These are compiled by my loving wife Gwen who has a gift for finding tawdry tweets from academics and journalists which can be filed for future use in cold dishes they will not relish.

There were two sordid constants. First, a subtext of sheer sectarian hatred because of my belief in reaching out to unionists.

Second, the smear that I am a traitorous Tory hack sucking up to British media. In fact I have turned down scores of UK media offers.

Last week, for example, I emailed the BBC and the Daily Mail to explain that, although I disagreed with my Government, I was not going to give it grief on British media while it was locked in battle on the backstop.

Thanks to the freedom of speech given to me in the Sunday Independent, I prefer to fight my backstop battle at home because I believe robust public debate is vital to Irish democracy.

But we don’t do debates in Ireland. We do dogma.

Says the man who earlier in the column writes ‘The main dissenting voice was that of Jonathan Powell to whom the panel showed a baffling deference given his sentiments seemed similar to Sinn Fein’s’. Not even a hint of doubt about the proposition that SF’s position on an issue is always wrong.

Meanwhile, speaking of which, it was entertaining to hear Fintan O’Toole on the Irish Times Politics podcast doubling down on his proposal. In an exchange between O’Toole and Eoin Ó Broin the former chastised the response to his proposal, not least from Roy Greenslade in the IT who had spoken to British LP remainers who uniformly argued the arithmetic didn’t add up. Perhaps indicating the essential unseriousness of the approach to politics on display in his proposal O’Toole argued…

It’s extraordinary that Roy Greenslade who is a journalist writes a letter [quoting those Remain BLPers who poured water on FOT’s idea] and won’t tell us who they are. These are meant to be politicians. I’ve never heard of politicians taking a position on a public question without putting their names to it…not willing to say who they are or why they are taking the position…

Really? The pages of newspapers, edited by himself no less, are far from unfamiliar to that phenomenon.

This has to be mentioned again… the source material, during the week, oblivious to his own extreme hostility to SF ‘disruptive nationalists of a piece with Johnson et al’ for their temerity in not thinking his small proposal was such a great idea….

Sinn Féin reacted with such extreme and immediate hostility to my suggestion that it could stop a no-deal Brexit by destroying Boris Johnson’s majority in the House of Commons. I wrote very respectfully of the party’s mandate for abstentionism and tried to find a way to honour it while activating the power of the seven seats it holds at Westminster.

Across the water, Larry Elliott in the Guardian thinks that we are in the midst of a backlash against globalisation and a turn back to ‘local solutions, stronger nation states and a reformed international system’ and reaches for a parallel from history writing…

…the economic crisis of the 1930s – of which protectionism was one part – led eventually, albeit after the war, to reforms that made the world a sounder and safer place.

Except – even factoring in the small detail of World War Two – doesn’t that offer a counter-example, surely World War Two was fuelled in part by…er… nation states and subsequently the post-war period then saw a significant step forward in terms of international trade, cooperation and so on?