Behind the scenes during Covid in the North May 17, 2024
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Intriguing insight into the thought processes at work at the start of the pandemic in the DUP with the release of texts from DUP leadership figures at the inquiry into Covid in Northern Ireland.
The Independent framed this as embarrassing for the DUP. Maybe.
The WhatsApp messages, some of which are acutely embarrassing for senior party figures, are being made public after they were given to the inquiry by former DUP minister Edwin Poots, now the Assembly Speaker, and have been published tonight.
The DUP messages are from a WhatsApp group containing its Executive ministers, special advisers, and other senior party figures.
They show the party lampooning the Catholic Church…[etc]
To a degree:
The Education Minister said on 13 March: “I see on PA, Archbishop Eamon Martin is writing to me urging me to close all the schools. Wasn’t aware of his qualifications in virology.”
Someone whose name has been blacked out said: “Write back and tell him we don’t live in the South and that his institution hasn’t the best track record of looking out for the welfare of kids.”
The following day, in an apparent reference to Sinn Féin, someone denounced “panicking people” and “totally irresponsible” behaviour.
On 14 March, in a reference to civil servants, someone said that “some of the officials don’t inspire me”.
Reading all this I kept thinking, it could be much worse.
Ms Little Pengelly’s influence with Mrs Foster is evident. On 17 March, she set out how lockdown was likely days away and they needed to propose multiple measures including a single website for all pandemic information and “a stateswomanlike address to NI by FM and DFM”.
She said: “We also need to be aware that in behaviour science terms we are now dealing with emergency, war time like circumstance – ergo people want to see what is termed in political science as ‘strong man’ political leaders – (now strong women..) – this is very well established. Strong and serious, calm and professional.” She urged ministers to be “empathetic and understanding” to the pressures faced by those struggling financially, reminding them that “those on working tax credit get free school meals (FSM}, many on that benefit DO work but may find themselves on reduced hours or redundant…and many of those on FSMs are our voters (I am saying this as a child who was a FSM child for many years).”
That is in stark contrast to Sinn Féin, whose Stormont leader Michelle O’Neill admitted to the inquiry yesterday that she deliberately deleted everything from all her devices despite being warned by the Head of the Civil Service not to do so and despite being given written legal advice which specifically said text messages and WhatsApps should not be deleted.
So far, the inquiry hasn’t published a single internal Sinn Féin message.
Dublin Communities Against Racism highlight the deliberate targeting of opposition candidates, NOT the government parties in run up to elections. May 17, 2024
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“Useful Idiots offer no solution and defend the status quo”
As local and EU parliament elections approach, far-right disruptors have intensified their politically motivated attacks with a slew of threats on candidates and politicians, including the removal and destruction of posters.
They have focused, not on the parties in government, but on the likes of Sinn Féin, People Before Profit, Social Democrats, and left independents – meanwhile those responsible for our crises in housing, health, and services are being ignored.
As Joe Mooney (DCAR spokesperson) highlighted today :
“Conveniently, these incidents all let the government off the hook. The Irish far-right, and its allies in Britain and among Ulster loyalism, are clearly happier to attack republican, socialist, and non-mainstream political parties and independents who offer an alternative to the government’s economic agenda, rather than targeting the Government parties who have dominated for decades”.
Footage has gone viral several times of far-right agitators threatening Sinn Féin candidates and removing posters – in Coolock, Blanchardstown and other areas. These have been amplified and promoted by right-wing propaganda sites and social media accounts to encourage copycat behaviour.
Inflammatory graffiti has sprung up, for instance in Cabra , accusing Sinn Féin of being traitors, with the aim of provoking aggressive behaviour towards canvassers. Very serious incidents have occurred targeting other parties and independents.
Two Social Democrat women were threatened with knives by men in Smithfield. Independent Left councillor John Lyons in Artane-Whitehall had his posters torn down and has been threatened with violence. People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy has had graffiti reading ‘Paul Murphy RIP’ appear outside his family home. A sitting councillor, Tania Doyle in Ongar was viciously attacked by a man demanding her views on immigration, along with her husband, when setting up posters in the vicinity of her own home.
According to Aaron Downey (DCAR spokesperson):
“These are all thuggish, cowardly acts. They are outbursts of violence which have been encouraged by a network of insidious manipulators – ‘citizen journalists’, far-right election candidates, and international racist groupings.”
Helena McCann (DCAR spokesperson) highlighted the particular venom directed at women:
“Those that claim to care about ‘protecting women’ clearly have no issue targeting women running for election with threats or outright assault.”
This increase in aggressive behaviour cannot be separated from the deliberate raising of tensions by the actions and rhetoric of the various far-right and racist candidates, as previously warned of by Dublin Communities Against Racism.
Speaking of polls… May 17, 2024
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To be treated with considerable caution, a report in the Independent on:
Private polling data, confirmed by the Irish Independent, shows Independent and smaller party candidates firmly in contention for up to six seats in the European elections.
The polling was undertaken in the last 10 days with a sample size of about 1,400 and a full slate of candidates.
And:
Barry Cowen’s chances of getting elected as an MEP are being jeopardised by Fianna Fáil splitting their vote between three candidates.
Meanwhile, right-wing shock-jock Niall Boylan is fighting it out with soft-left candidates Ciarán Cuffe and Aodhán Ó Ríordáin for a seat.
And the Social Democrats are a very long shot for a seat, with Holly Cairns’ candidate challenging two sitting MEPs.
Sinn Féin will comfortably win three seats, but the party is falling short of taking second seats.
And Simon Harris is in contention for a “freak” result with his line-up.
Just looking through the list what left MEPs are well placed to get seats? Perhaps only Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan, Katherine Funchion and Lynn Boylan. Though oddly those three are, according to this, to be poll toppers. As to others, Clare Daly and Mick Wallace are ‘scrambling’ or ‘scavenging’. As to Labour and the Social Democrats it appears they’re under pressure.
A United Ireland, when? May 16, 2024
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That European Movement Ireland poll on various matters was interesting. But perhaps most interesting was the question of a United Ireland.
The poll asked whether respondents believe there will be a united Ireland in the EU in the next ten years.
In the Republic of Ireland:
- 25% said yes
- 55% said no
- 20% didn’t know
In Northern Ireland:
- 47% said yes
- 43% said no
- 10% didn’t know
Northern Ireland participants were asked if they think Northern Ireland has a good relationship with the EU. 53% said yes, 38% said no, and 9% didn’t know.
That difference between North and South is quite distinctive isn’t it? What is driving that I wonder? Is it a sense that the British polity is unstable in a way that the Irish one isn’t – at least in terms of perception? Is it that politics in the North is so contingent, with the Assembly and Executive only recently returned? Is it that the Brexit issue continues to grind on – only this week we have had the ruling in a court in Northern Ireland on … Perhaps it speaks to a need for calm.
All that said, where do people here stand on this matter? I don’t believe there will be a United Ireland within ten years. Twenty, possibly, maybe. Ten seems far too soon – given one has to factor in so many variables, not least a British Secretary of State going for a border poll. But what at turnaround if it was Northern Ireland that was more active in seeking unity. And sure, even writing that that simplifies so many aspects of the issue – not least the fact that asking about perceptions of the future doesn’t mean that within either the YES or NO cohorts are those who want it to be YES or NO?
Still food for thought.
Mind you the Belfast Telegraph take on this was entertaining:
A majority of people across both Northern Ireland and the Republic do not believe there will be a united Ireland in the European Union in the next decade.
True, but funny to see them depending upon the entirety of the island.
Academic freedom? May 16, 2024
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There was a letter in The Irish Times this week that took TCD to task in terms of the soon to be established Taskforce which ‘might recommend that TCD discourage future collaborations with Israeli academics. (Again, there is no mention of illegal settlements; any and all links to Israeli universities will apparently be up for debate.) Allowing researchers to conduct their studies as they and their academic peers see fit — free from political interference – is a cornerstone of academic freedom, and such a move would significantly undermine this important principle.’
On the IT politics podcast Hugh Linehan mentioned third level institutions and freedom of speech, this time in relation to Israel. This in respect of the TCDSU demands that that college should cut links with Israeli third level institutions. Harry McGee was quick to point out that the IDF had levelled third level institutions in Gaza with no clear outcry from Israel’s academia as a whole (no doubt there are individuals and groups but the point stands) which makes calls for academic freedom seem somewhat beside the point.
New poll: March of Independents halted, Sinn Féin now level with Fine Gael? May 16, 2024
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Waking up to this from the Irish Times. A poll that has the following findings:
Sinn Féin 23 per cent (down five); Fine Gael 23 per cent (up four); Fianna Fáil 20 per cent (no change).
…the Green Party is at 4 per cent (down one); Labour 5 per cent (up one); the Social Democrats 3 per cent (down one); Solidarity-People Before Profit 2 per cent (no change); Aontú 1 per cent (no change).
Independents are at 17 per cent (no change). Rounding may affect the totals.
Undecideds are at 19 per cent having fallen by 6 per cent.
And in terms of government formation?
the most popular option was a continuation of the present Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael-Green combination which was nominated by 33 per cent. A Government led by Sinn Féin with neither Fianna Fáil nor Fine Gael was chosen by 20 per cent of voters.
The only movement outside the MOE is that of Fine Gael and Labour. Is this the beginning of a Harris bounce? It sure looks like it. And that 23 per cent could be crucial for that party going into an election.
That Independent figure is perhaps most intriguing. It could hardly be called poor, and yet it doesn’t quite match, and this close in to local and European elections, with other even more stellar levels (19 and 21 per cent respectively in Independent and RedC polls in the last four weeks). This is the point where there’s maximum focus on Independents and Others and one might actually expect their ratings to soar even further. So what’s that about? A bit too much new crazy in amongst the more traditional independent vote? Or perhaps some people shifting slightly to Fine Gael, because whatever else the dynamic there is hardly one of SF voters going to that former party. That SF vote though doesn’t appear to be going left.
Self-evidently, Sinn Féin has had some significant rate of attrition since the heady days it was reaching into the mid-thirties in support. This cannot be a comfortable time for them. How will they fare in locals and Europeans. Reasonably well seems to be the answer, but not as well as hoped for. Does that feed into their approach at the General Election?
Still, for all that doesn’t this seem very reminiscent of 2019? Then Sinn Féin significantly underperformed at local elections – performed badly to be frank. And yet hardly a year later at the General Election it went on to a significant rise in support.
This isn’t 2019. It doesn’t look like SF will face the losses it did then. It may even hold fairly steady. This is, obviously, an electoral contest (two to be precise – local and European). But it’s not about government. When that issue comes to the fore, what will the polls be like?
BLP News: Trade unions meet Starmer, and the after-effects of that Tory defection May 15, 2024
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On Tuesday, a number of British trade union general secretaries trooped up to the British Labour Party’s Southwark offices to meet Keir Starmer, leader of the political formation supposedly representing them in parliament. Concerns they had and many, and rightly so.
The party has proposed sweeping overhauls of workers’ rights, including day one protections against unfair dismissal, maternity and sick pay, bans on zero-hours contracts and fire and rehire practices, fair pay agreements and trade union access.
But some changes since the rights were first proposed have angered unions, including tweaks to allow workers to stay on zero-hours contracts if they prefer – which they say would be a loophole for exploitation.
And then:
…several general secretaries are expected to express anger at the defection of Elphicke to Labour – highlighting previous anti-trade union comments.
The FBU general secretary, Matt Wrack, who became president of the TUC in September, wrote to Starmer over the weekend saying her decision to defect from the Conservatives was particularly concerning because of Labour’s promise to repeal the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, which effectively bans strike action across parts of the public sector.
“Elphicke was a cheerleader for the minimum service levels act and has specifically targeted firefighters in her contributions in parliament,” Wrack wrote.
“On Tuesday 12 March this year, she spoke in support of the new anti-union laws by blaming striking firefighters for the deaths of three people during a past national firefighters’ strike. This is a disgraceful attack on firefighters, who protect the public and save lives every day, sometimes at great personal cost,” he wrote.
One wonders if the Elhpicke move was a headache for Starmer’s crew, one that meant they had less room than they might have expected to manoeuvre with the unions. It might have caused the leadership to be less combative with the unions (because you can bet this leadership was only itching to assert themselves with them). Later they issued a statement with the union leaders that said:
Together we have reiterated Labour’s full commitment to the New Deal for Working People as agreed in July.
“We will continue to work together at pace on how a Labour Government would implement it in legislation.”
As Jessica Elgot of the Guardian noted:
The key part of this is “AS AGREED IN JULY” – the bone of contention ahead of this meeting for the majority of trade unions was they felt the party’s language and commitments on things like fire and rehire and zero hours had changed SINCE it was signed off by them last year.
Unite and the FBU have been vocal on this – but privately the majority of affiliated trade unions thought this. Sources say it was pretty much a united front to demand the party return to the NPF’s language.
The language used in the draft given to unions had changed since it was voted on at conference – on fire and rehire it wasn’t clear if the party was still committing to legislate. On zero hours, it wasn’t clear if employers had to proactively offer a set contract.
Crucially, Unite has agreed this joint statement.
That’s a big move because they did not endorse the version of the New Deal which was agreed at conference, and wanted to return to the original green paper from 2021 which was much more radical.
It’s telling how much of an issue Elphicke became this week. Andrew Rawnsley in the Guardian had a fairly scathing overview of that. He notes:
“I’m completely fine with it,” says one of the non-squeamish members of the shadow cabinet. “We’ve got an election to win. The name of the game is beating the Tories. When an opportunity like this comes along, you can’t pass it up.” It is fair to say that this is by no means a universal view. When told, late on, that the defection was imminent, the Labour chief whip, Sir Alan Campbell, cautioned Sir Keir to expect some unhappiness in his own ranks. The leader’s team told themselves they could live with a bit of that. What they did not anticipate was the scale and the intensity of the backlash.
How could they not? Only people with little or no understanding of politics, or ideology, or political history, people in other words who were not advisors or leaders of a political party, could have been unaware of how this would play out.
In some ways this is the most telling indication of the nature of the Starmer leadership. It is an essentially depoliticised cohort who the unnamed shadow cabinet member quoted above exemplifies. Because it’s not just about beating the Tories. That’s the difficult easy bit – difficult as proven by election after election. But easy because it is governing and providing an alternative to them which is the difficult difficult bit, as proven by Labour government after Labour government. And the sense that this crew are going to find themselves almost incapacitated by the scale of the real challenge ahead, once they arrive in power, is very strong. Why? Since once beaten the Tories can’t be beaten again until the next election. Something has to fill in the meantime.
Sure Rawnsley points to one group who might take offence at the addition to their ranks.
some of it is coming from residual Corbynites and other elements of the left in parliament and the media, for whom this is confirmatory proof that there is no position or person so rightwing that Sir Keir might not throw his arms around them. It has also given them a good excuse to ask why, if Ms Elphicke is a fit and proper person to be a Labour MP, isn’t Diane Abbott getting the party whip back? To this sort of criticism, Sir Keir’s people shrug that it is the usual suspects making the usual complaint about him because they’ve never grasped that nothing matters more than securing power.
But:
The much bigger concern for the Labour leader is how quickly astonishment turned into antagonism among mainstream Labour folk. One Labour MP speaks for many when they say: “I get the bigger picture, I get what a coup it was to do it at PMQs. But people are finding this very hard to swallow.”
This might have been foreseen because Ms Elphicke has landed in Labour with more baggage than a luggage carousel at Heathrow during the school summer holidays. Some feel nauseous about admitting a woman with such a plump back catalogue of hard rightery that it would have made much more sense if she had switched to Reform. Others have gagged on her behaviour in relation to her former husband and predecessor as Dover’s MP, Charlie, the notorious “naughty Tory” who was jailed for two years for sexually assaulting two women. Ms Elphicke was given a one-day ban from the Commons for improperly trying to influence the trial judge and protested her then husband’s innocence by claiming that he was “charismatic and attractive”, an “easy target for dirty politics and false allegations” and had suffered “a terrible miscarriage of justice”. It has taken her a long time to disown those remarks. In fact, she only offered her regrets after female Labour MPs responded to her parachute drop on to their benches with fury about her past victim-blaming.
Rawnsley rightly notes:
The broader reason for the unease rippling through Labour’s ranks is that it feeds into the anxiety that there is no compromise with their party’s values that the leadership might not make in pursuit of what it sees as potential electoral advantage. It is also worth asking whether this defection is more harm than help to the advancement of the Labour cause. Voters may have a general preference for broad-church parties, but they also tend to like them to come with sturdy walls and some pillars of principle.
Perhaps there was a part of the Labour leader’s brain that was flashing warning lights when he agreed to bring the Elphicke into the room. I thought so when he and his newest MP appeared together for a brief photo-op in his parliamentary office. The body language, especially his, screamed awks. Copulating porcupines look more relaxed than they did.
This isn’t going to throw the election for Labour, it is probably not going to gain any increased support either. But it is a clue, one of many, as to the lack of political judgement on display by this current leadership. That, that is the real problem. And that’s not going to go away.
Broadcasting moratorium May 15, 2024
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This is a thought. From Laura Slattery in The Irish Times, who suggests that broadcasting moratoriums in an age of social media are a bad idea.
…broadcasters hate moratoriums and most have done so for years. Ironically, they have difficulty getting anyone to listen to them on this.
They are, however, not the only ones to object to their imposition. While candidates desperate for votes are never going to love a phenomenon that temporarily deplatforms them, some politicians do have other, more serious concerns. Minister for Local Government Darragh O’Brien, for instance, has written to broadcasting regulator Coimisiún na Meán to warn that moratoriums could hand a free pass to any foreign and domestic sources intent on electoral interference.
I’ve never been much of a fan myself. That said, I get the concerns. Imagine the morning of a poll that a news organisation splashed a poll or some such. Could that swing an election, alter it? I don’t know but it’s not impossible that it might do so. So it’s not simply about doing away with moratoriums but also what might be permitted or not.
I did not know the following:
Moratoriums have got shorter. They used to cover the entire day before an election as well as election day itself up to the closing of polls. But after objections – notably from TV3, now known as Virgin Media Television – the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) moved the moratorium for the 2011 general election to 2pm on the day before the vote, allowing for one last lunchtime campaigning push on air.
Slattery argues against any moratorium, or failing that one from 10pm the night before the vote. How about a moratorium on the day of the vote?
What you want to say – 15th May 2024 May 15, 2024
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As always, following on Dr. X’s suggestion, it’s all yours, “announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose”, feel free.
That Starmer government in waiting May 14, 2024
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Interesting interview with Mick McAteer, ex-Financial Conduct Authority board member, in the Business Post. McAteer was born in Derry and the piece notes he’s of an age to remember the Civil Rights activism there. But it’s his thoughts on the contemporary that are most useful.
McAteer believes neither Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, will have any inclination to stand up to the City of London or empower regulators.
New Labour, under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, were “much better than a lot when it comes to retail financial services and consumer issues.”
“I think this current group within Labour are even less ambitious and actually more friendly to the City than New Labour was,” he said.
Yikes.
Mind you this is important too:
If he had one piece of advice for Reeves, who looks set to end up running the British Treasury after the upcoming election, it would be to give regulators and the Bank of England a mandate to align the financial system with the transition to net zero.
He believes it’s “bizarre” that the FCA has no statutory objective to help tackle the climate crisis.
“There’s no way the UK is ever going to achieve or play its full potential in the net zero transition unless the financial institutions in this country are required to change their behaviours in a meaningful way,” McAteer said.
By the way, this is a good observation:
“The reason why the credit union movement was so big in Derry was because quite simply, Catholics couldn’t get bank accounts. It’s as simple as that,” he said.
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 