The Guardian: Brexit’s legacy for England will be politics as sectarian as Northern Ireland’s

To understand that this possible Ulsterisation of British politics is a genuinely serious prospect, step back a bit and consider the way that electoral behaviour has been evolving in Britain. Ever since 1964, political scientists, mainly based at Nuffield College, Oxford, have worked on the British Election Study (BES). For more than half a century they have tracked the decline of the old industrial-based two-party system in which general elections were fought between the Conservatives and Labour, who battled for the floating voters in the middle ground across the land.

Today’s electoral politics are fundamentally different. A long-term trend of dealignment from the two big parties means that voters are no longer loyal battalions of partisans. Millions of individual voters are now happy to switch between an increasing array of parties. In 2015, 43% of them voted for a different party from the one they had supported in 2010. In 2017, 33% switched from their 2015 vote. In 2019, a similar kaleidoscopic change seems certain. Tellingly, a BES study of these two recent elections, due for publication in December, will be titled Electoral Shocks: the Volatile Voter in a Turbulent World. [...]

Northern Ireland’s divides are rooted in centuries of religious divide. The Brexit divide in Britain is far more recent. But it is rooted in identities and anger, too. If Brexit does become the defining issue in mid-21st-century British politics, the hope of a country coming back together could be as fragile as the dream of Irish peace now is, and just as fraught.

read the article

The Guardian: Arlene Foster signals DUP shift on Northern Ireland border issue

In a break with previous rhetoric where she has strongly opposed treating the region differently to the rest of the UK, Foster said the final deal would have to recognise Northern Ireland’s unique historical and geographical position and the fact it will be the UK’s only land border with the EU.

Asked by reporters if it was possible to see Northern Ireland-only solutions that would not affect the constitutional link with Great Britain, she replied: “Well I hope so.” [...]

She made clear that her idea of an acceptable Northern Ireland-only solution was different to mooted proposals for a Northern Ireland-only backstop, which she said “would bring about customs [checks] between Great Britain and Northern Ireland and that is unconstitutional and undemocratic”. [...]

Echoing words of the party’s chief whip Sir Jeffrey Donaldson earlier this week, she said the solution lay in a joint letter she co-authored with the late leader of Sinn Féin, Martin McGuinness, in August 2016, a document rarely referred to by the DUP in the past two years.

read the article

The Guardian: MPs vote to extend abortion and same-sex marriage rights to Northern Ireland

The changes came via amendments to an otherwise technical government bill connected to budgets and elections for the devolved assembly. In the first amendment, tabled by the Labour MP Conor McGinn, a longstanding campaigner for equal marriage in Northern Ireland, the Commons voted 383 to 73 to extend it to the region.

In a vote soon afterwards, MPs approved an amendment by another Labour MP, Stella Creasy, to extend abortion rights to Northern Ireland, the only part of the UK where it remains illegal. The vote was passed by 332 to 9.

Both were free votes as they were viewed as matters of conscience. While the Northern Ireland minister, John Penrose, who spoke for the government, warned MPs that both potential changes would be fraught with complications, he voted in favour of both amendments.[...]

The votes could also affect efforts to revive the executive and assembly at Stormont. While Naomi Long, the Alliance leader, said they could unlock the talks, others speculated that Sinn Féin, which supports social liberalisation, now has an incentive to delay the restoration of devolution to let the amendments take effect.

read the article

Reuters: Northern Irish party surges in EU poll, seeks Brexit referendum

The vote also indicated increasing support for candidates not aligned to the traditional Catholic or Protestant voting blocs. It was the best national showing for the Alliance Party, which was founded almost 50 years ago, just as Northern Ireland’s violent period known as “The Troubles” deepened.[...]

The vote also indicated increasing support for candidates not aligned to the traditional Catholic or Protestant voting blocs. It was the best national showing for the Alliance Party, which was founded almost 50 years ago, just as Northern Ireland’s violent period known as “The Troubles” deepened.[...]

Northern Ireland still overwhelmingly votes along traditional lines two decades after a peace deal ended 30 years of sectarian violence, choosing mainly Catholic nationalists who favour a united Ireland or predominantly Protestant unionists who want to remain British.

read the article

openDemocracy: The ruling class that drove Brexit

After Trump’s election, millions of words were typed about how ‘blue collar’ areas had turned out to vote Republican. Yet Clinton led by 11% among voters who earn less than $50,000. Trump secured his victory by winning among those who earn $50-200,000. Much the same can be said for the far right in Italy, whose core support is in the wealthier – though now de-industrialising – north, rather than in the more impoverished south; or about Brazil, where 97% of the richest areas voted for the fascist Bolsonaro, whilst 98% of the poorest neighbourhoods voted for the Workers’ Party candidate, Haddad.

We see a similar distortion in debate about Brexit. After the vote, journalists went on endless tours of deprived areas to report on how working-class people voted Leave (which many did). However, they somehow forgot to mention that wealthy counties like Wiltshire backed Brexit, while some of the poorest areas of the UK – the western parts of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as Liverpool and Leicester – voted Remain. Academics who studied the class breakdown of the Brexit vote found ‘the Leave vote to be associated with middle class identification and the more neutral “no class” identification. But we find no evidence of a link with working class identification.’ [...]

To put it another way: the decade since the financial crisis has accelerated the emergence of a new global oligarch class. With growing wealth has come growing power and a growing ability to shape political debate through the dominant communications technology of the era: TV and the internet. As has long happened with right-wing movements, they have done so in close collaboration with military and security networks. Because the era is neoliberalism, those networks are largely privatised, made up of mercenary firms with names like Palantir, Arcanum, SCL, AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica. [...]

Cook himself lives in a semi-detached house in suburban Glasgow, which is probably worth less than the value of the donation his group gave the DUP, and appears unlikely to be the source of the cash. He denies any wrongdoing. The UK electoral regulator is supposed to know where the DUP cash comes from, and claims that it does, even if it isn’t allowed to tell us. But recent court documents have cast doubt on its confidence: its investigations seem to have amounted to asking Richard Cook where he got the money, and then believing his answers. A country doesn’t become the world centre for money laundering by employing inquisitive officials.[...]

A few years after Thiel founded Palantir, he wrote a now-notorious essay in which he argued that the extension of the franchise to women has ‘rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron’ and therefore that his fellow libertarians must focus on developing the technology that will ensure that it is capitalism, rather than democracy, which wins the struggle: ‘The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.’

read the article

Vox: British Prime Minister Theresa May wins confidence vote despite Brexit defeat

May survived, and has not given any real indication that she will resign. But it’s hard to count this as a real “win.” She still doesn’t have support from her own party on her Brexit deal, and she’s already faced an internal party revolt last month. May’s own Conservative party tried to oust her in a (failed) no-confidence vote in December, and more than 100 Tories voted against her deal on Tuesday. So did Northern Ireland’s DUP. [...]

None of those factions, though, want to risk a prime minister or party coming to power that is opposed to their camp’s aims. If May’s government had lost the no-confidence vote, it could trigger general elections. And that could have potentially brought Labour to power — and handed Jeremy Corbyn the prime ministership, something especially unpalatable to hardline Conservatives or the DUP. [...]

So to recap, May survived the vote due to party loyalty, and the fear among the different Conservative party factions and the DUP that if her government went down, something worse would take its place. It’s not exactly a reassuring outcome. May could face another no-confidence vote in the House of Commons before this Brexit debate is over, or she could resign if she feels she doesn’t have the support for her brand of Brexit.

read the article

Politico: How the Brexit vote was lost

Theresa May's Brexit deal was defeated by 432 votes to 202 — a majority of 230. Scores of her own backbenchers rejected the deal, but she did pick up a handful of opposition votes.

Using POLITICO Pro Intelligence, we've analyzed how the vote was lost.

see the map and the graphs

Politico: How to break the Brexit impasse: Reunite Ireland

Add this all up, and it’s getting hard to avoid the conclusion that Brexit would be a lot easier for the British if Northern Ireland were to vote to break away from the U.K. and rejoin the rest of the island — an eventuality made possible by the Good Friday Agreement, which allows for a so-called border poll, “if at any time it appears likely” that a majority of Northern Ireland would support reunification.[...]

The DUP’s fundamentalist Christian viewpoint also doesn’t sit well with many in the north of Ireland who look to the south and see a modern, pluralist, inclusive society that has passed referendums on marriage equality and reproductive rights; rights opposed by the DUP.[...]

That doesn’t even take into consideration higher economic activity rates, better wages and an industrial output in the Republic that is 10 times that of Northern Ireland. A united Ireland in which the average annual wage is €45,000 rather than €30,000 isn’t looking too shabby to many unionists.[...]

For the first time in 21 years since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, there is neither an Assembly sitting in Stormont, nor are there any talks or political initiatives being pushed by Secretary of State Karen Bradley in order to get the institutions up and running again.

read the article

Bloomberg: What If Ireland Scuppers Theresa May's Brexit Deal?

If Arlene Foster's Democratic Unionist Party stymies that agreement, it would mark an unprecedented win for what was once a fringe group on the British political scene. But in the long term it could actually promote the very idea the DUP opposes above all else: a united Ireland. While the party supports Brexit, Northern Ireland voted 56 percent in favor of remaining in the EU, well above the national 48 percent remain vote. [...]

Of course, some checks already exist. But she is threatening to vote down the budget this month if she’s unhappy with what May agrees at an EU summit next week. That might not topple the government – but it would make it very tricky to govern, and potentially impossible if hardline Conservative Brexiters also decide to rebel.[...]

Negotiations over inquests into what are referred to as “legacy” issues have repeatedly bedeviled co-operation. More than 100 “peace walls” still separate Catholic and Protestant communities; the plan to remove them by 2023 looks wildly optimistic right now. Efforts to integrate an education system divided along religious lines have faltered. Public-sector housing estates are also deeply divided.[...]

“Neither Sinn Fein nor the DUP truly believe in a settlement based on multiple identities or pooled sovereignty – the kind facilitated by EU membership,” according to Matt O’Toole, a Northern Irishman who was chief press officer for Europe at 10 Downing Street during the referendum campaign. “Both now want to achieve something from Brexit that is less of a compromise than what existed before.”

read the article

The Conversation: What happens if parliament rejects a Brexit deal?

Yet, after the result of the 2017 general election, the current government does not command a majority in parliament – it relies upon the support of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to stay in power, and is particularly vulnerable to dissent from within the Conservative Party itself. With Labour now indicating that it will almost certainly vote against the government’s Brexit deal, there is a very real prospect that the House of Commons might vote to reject the government’s agreement. This would be crucial, for while the House of Lords must also have the opportunity to debate the deal, its approval is not legally required for the government to ratify the deal. [...]

A successful no confidence vote in the government would not automatically trigger a general election – there would first be a 14-day period during which there could be attempts to form an alternative government, perhaps led by a new (or interim) prime minister. But the Conservative rebels who might defeat the government on a motion on the Withdrawal Agreement probably don’t want to see a general election that would give Labour the chance of power. It’s possible they could vote against the Brexit deal, but then in favour of the government retaining office in a no confidence vote, in the hope that this might see the UK sleepwalk towards a “no deal” exit from the EU. [...]

Alternatively, if MPs reject the Withdrawal Agreement on offer, and the path to a general election is blocked, could the prime minister call a second referendum to try to break the political deadlock? There is no standing legal provision for a further referendum, so this would need new legislation, and probably the support of the government and the opposition. This would be politically challenging, given the government has consistently ruled out a further referendum and Labour is sceptical. It would also be immensely time-consuming: it took around seven months for parliament to pass the EU Referendum Act 2015, time which is simply not available now before March 2019. [...]

The difficulty is that an extension requires the unanimous agreement of all 27 remaining EU member states. And it’s also by no means clear that the UK would be willing to delay withdrawal, particularly as the government was so eager to write a fixed exit date into domestic law.

read the article

The Atlantic: The Incredible Staying Power of Theresa May

But perhaps the greatest challenge to May’s Brexit plan didn’t come from her party at all. Arlene Foster, the leader of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, which is currently propping up May’s government in Westminster, offered a stern warning that her party would not support a Brexit deal that puts any divergence between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K., including a customs border in the Irish sea or a special customs union for Belfast alone. This, Foster said, would be the DUP’s “blood red” line.

For all the divisions over Brexit that remain within the party, May’s hold to the leadership appears to be safe—at least for now. When all was said and done, even some of the prime minister’s staunchest critics conceded that her speech had bought her time to hammer out a deal, even if didn’t necessarily evoke full-fledged support for it. And while critics of Chequers are unlikely to change their mind anytime soon, they at least seem to agree that now wouldn’t be the right time to try and trigger a leadership election to push May out. [...]

A recent poll found that the Conservatives were more likely to win the next general election under May than other potential leadership rivals right now—a belief that also seems to have buoyed tacit support for May to remain in her role. But even those who have thrown their support behind the prime minister for now have conceded that this support may be time-limited. “I just think politics is a short-term game,” the House of Commons Leader and Conservative lawmaker Andrea Leadsom said Wednesday when asked whether the party would support the prime minister in the next election. “A week changes a lot. I think she’s had a fantastic day today.”

read the article

The Guardian: Homophobia is alive and kicking. The LGBT ‘cure’ ban is pure pink-washing

Absolutely right. But banning conversion therapy is confusing cause and effect: it is simply the most extreme and obvious effect of homophobia. It’s also an easy win, like banning the use of kittens as footballs. The abhorrent practice that has to go is homophobia. But “Minister recognises insidious nature of prejudice and attempts to unpick centuries of ingrained hate” makes a less snappy headline.

Buried within this long-overdue survey is a more startling, and depressing, figure: more than two-thirds of respondents said they had avoided holding hands in public with a same-sex partner. Startling, because it’s only two-thirds; depressing, because it just is. [...]

Right now, police forces across the country are preparing for a rise in domestic violence linked to England’s World Cup performance. A study by Lancaster University, published in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, found instances of domestic violence rose 38% when England lost, and 26% when they won or drew. Some women are cheering for their lives. There’s no research yet into homophobic violence at World Cup time, but you can feel it on the streets. LGBT hate incidents were experienced by 40% of respondents to the government survey, with over 90% of the most serious offences going unreported. [...]

A real action plan would tackle homophobia at the root, in health and education. It would make PrEP HIV drugs available to everyone today – one pill a day, proved to save lives and money by dramatically reducing HIV infection. The Scottish government has rolled it out nationwide; Theresa May refuses to.

Amanda Spielman, the chief inspector of schools in England, said some faith schools run by religious conservatives were “deliberately resisting” British values and equalities law. If May’s faith truly is the personal matter she insists it is, she’ll have no problem immediately secularising all state schools. Every pupil should be safe in a system that prioritises the rational over the supernatural, and love over hate.

read the article

The New York Review of Books: How Ulster Unionists Block Brexit

The DUP is, strictly speaking, not a British party at all: it organizes and contests elections only in Northern Ireland, where it has become the largest party on the Protestant and Unionist side of the divide. But its raison d’être is the preservation of the “British” identity and political allegiance among those in Northern Ireland—and therefore the maintenance of Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom. Yet the DUP’s Britishness is increasingly out of kilter with Britain itself. This is a decidedly unbalanced love affair in which most of the ardor is on one side. What the DUP thinks of as an indissoluble bond is, for British Conservatives, a marriage of convenience.

There are two underlying problems. One is religion. Historically speaking, there is no doubt that English and, later, British identity pivoted on Protestantism. The collective “us” was defined in opposition to a “them” that was primarily Catholic: Catholic Spain, Catholic France, Catholic rebels in Ireland and Scotland. The DUP’s own mindset is completely in accord with this Protestant formation. Its history is militantly anti-Catholic, and though it tries to play this down nowadays, the reality of Northern Ireland’s sectarian divide is that Democratic Unionists still see themselves facing off against a growing and increasingly assertive Catholic minority. [...]

The other problem for the DUP is the rise of a specifically English nationalism. English conservatism has long seen the preservation of the Union, including Northern Ireland, as a definitive goal: May’s party, after all, is officially still called the Conservative and Unionist Party. But the Brexit project has shown this commitment to be much stronger in rhetoric than in reality. Both Scotland and Northern Ireland voted decisively against leaving the EU. The Brexiteers are willing to go much further than just ignoring the wishes of those populations; it is clear that if Brexit were to lead to an independent Scotland and a United Ireland, its proponents would see these outcomes as prices worth paying. This makes sense: Brexit is, above all, an English national revolution—and its imagined act of liberation would be all the purer if it resulted in an independent English state.

read the article

The Guardian: Could Theresa May’s pact with the DUP lead to a united Ireland?

The warning signs that the Tories had no idea what they were doing were there from the outset: in a stunning display of both arrogance and stupidity, they announced they had reached a deal with the DUP before negotiations had begun, assuming a party with 10 MPs would acquiesce rather than face the embarrassment of correcting them. But the embarrassment was all Theresa May’s, as well the DUP knew, as they forced the Conservatives to step back up to the lectern and admit their error. The next error was assuming that if the Tories flew over for the weekend, the DUP would meet them on a Sunday. If Tory special advisers failed to pick up the most basic knowledge about the working habits of Free Presbyterians on the Sabbath, it’s little surprise they took so long to broker a deal. Unbelievably, the Conservatives hopped on a flight to Belfast assuming it would be a breeze to broker a deal with a party that sat through all of the negotiations leading to the Good Friday agreement and still opposed it. [...]

Keeping gay marriage and abortion illegal has long been made possible by a combination of the Republic opposing both, Sinn Féin maintaining some social conservatism and the rest of the UK largely ignoring the north. Now all of those supports have evaporated: Sinn Féin campaigned to repeal the eighth amendment, and is pushing the British government to legislate on same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland. Both access to abortion and LGBT marriage rights will be enshrined in law in the Republic, and the DUP is scrutinised now more than it has been since the heyday of Ian Paisley. [...]

This hypocrisy runs through the ongoing Brexit negotiations too. New research published by academics at Queen’s University Belfast on the attitudes of people in Northern Ireland show that the majority of people back same-sex marriage rights: 62% of people overall, with 75% of Catholics and 50.5% of Protestants backing mooted legislation.

read the article

Channel 4 News: A United Ireland? Some Northern Ireland Unionist figures 'ready to talk' unification

The thorny question of the Irish border after Brexit was on the agenda when the Prime Minister met the Irish Taoiseach at a summit today. Mr Varadkar warned that a possible Brexit deal could collapse if Britain doesn't say how it plans to keep the border open. And if a collapse led to a hard Brexit, could the outcome for Ireland be even more unexpected?

Channel 4 News has learned that some respected figures from the liberal wing of unionism are now ready to talk with the government in Dublin about Irish unity - and even a border poll.

CityLab: A Brexit Bridge Too Far

Delusions are often encouraged rather than cured by impending doom. And the tendency for otherwise conservative figures to suddenly believe in grand, expensive, almost utopian schemes has made its way into infrastructure. Why it has done so is more revealing than the details of the plans themselves. [...]

Today, the most likely risk is a colossal waste of public money. Given the proponents of the bridges, the signs are not encouraging. Boris Johnson’s tenure as Mayor of London was most notable for a series of expensive follies, from the Boris Bus and the ArcelorMittal Orbit to the Garden Bridge and the equally ephemeral Boris Island. Meanwhile, previous pronouncements by Sammy Wilson have been less “blue sky thinking” and more ominous thunderclouds on the horizon, once commending an Ulster Defense Association (UDA) plan for ethnic cleansing in Northern Ireland as a “very valuable return to reality.” [...]

The second problem is more concerning. In dealing so much in vague speculative projects without adequate planning or consultation, there is a risk of leading politicians losing touch with reality. A hundred years of dystopian literature and films have provided humanity a healthy skepticism towards those promising utopian futures. Conservatives are not immune from this tendency. Whether it’s the result of naivety or cynicism, they too can believe in fictional golden ages, in pasts that never really existed or in long-lost positions of glory that can be recovered. The resurgence of a British imperial mentality during and after the Brexit vote marks a worrying departure from objectivity, whether it’s looking outwards with unrealistic visions of replacing trade with Europe with that of the Commonwealth, or an inflated self-regard that can be traced to an alarming increase in xenophobic attacks.

read the article

The Spectator: Britain has lost control of the Brexit talks

Perhaps most worryingly, the idea that Northern Ireland could remain permanently in the customs union — which Theresa May once said ‘no British prime minister could ever concede’ — remains on the table. This brings about the prospect of an internal border within the UK in the Irish Sea — a situation which ministers know will prove unacceptable to a very large proportion of Northern Irish residents, not least among them the DUP, on whose votes the government relies for support. If the government does fall on a confidence vote before the projected date of the next election, in 2022, its demise may well be traceable to this week. [...]

Michel Barnier has been criticised for his obstinacy and his lack of imagination in solving issues such as the Irish border. It is true that his constant stonewalling of suggestions put forward by Britain shows the EU in bad light and is a reminder of the freedoms we might enjoy outside the bloc. His tone has been needlessly caustic, and he has seemed to take the Brexit talks as an audition for succeeding Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the European Commission. But his stubbornness is working: putting Britain on the back foot, forever struggling to defend itself. The government’s failure to come up with proposals has left a vacuum in which the EU is suggesting them for us. [...]

Also, the member states’ power over the European Commission is waning. In Britain, the EU is often thought about as a single entity — and one that in the end will do whatever Germany says. But Angela Merkel is struggling to exert control over her own government, let alone the continent. Juncker and Barnier see an EU that does not take its orders from member states, but draws (or claims to draw) its own democratic legitimacy from the European Parliament. The EU member states have an interest in a good deal with Britain. But the European Commission — the apparatus in Brussels — has an interest in Britain being seen to be worse off after leaving the EU. The Commission would also receive 80 per cent of the tariff revenue from UK exports to the EU, making ‘no deal’ more appealing to Brussels than to member states.

read the article

The Guardian: Tories seek to block move to reveal donations to DUP in EU referendum

Serious questions remain over the DUP’s spending on the EU referendum in June 2016 – including a £435,000 donation from a group called the Constitutional Research Council (CRC), chaired by Richard Cook, a former vice-chairman of the Scottish Conservatives and Unionist party.

The DUP spent more than £280,000 of that money on a wraparound advertisement in the London-based Metro newspaper, which is not distributed in Northern Ireland. [...]

However, after objections by Labour at the last-minute nature of the SI, the measure will now be put to a vote on Wednesday, where the party will attempt to get the law backdated to its introduction in 2014. Conservative MPs are under a three-line whip to oppose.

read the article

The Guardian view on Northern Ireland talks collapsing: the lost language of power-sharing

The darker truth here is that Sinn Féin has chosen to weaponise the language question for political ends, less to protect a minority than to antagonise unionists. Unionists have duly been antagonised. The Gaelic language is the main tongue of a mere 0.2% of the Northern Ireland population. Around 10% claim to understand it to some degree (perhaps just a few phrases). But Sinn Féin does not do things accidentally. Its proposals have become a weapon of tribalism in communities where identity politics always looms large and divisively. Fears that Irish may be made compulsory in schools, that a language qualification might become a job requirement and that street signs would be made bilingual are not all well grounded. But some are. Bilingual road signs, for instance, would take the issue into every street in Northern Ireland, with pointless provocative effect.

Another glum truth is that the terms of Northern Ireland politics have been unhelpfully reset by two actions for which responsibility lies squarely with the Conservative party in London. The first of these is Brexit, and the seeming willingness of many irresponsible Tories to countenance a hard border in Ireland. The second is the pact between the Tories and the DUP, which undermines the British government’s role as a co-guarantor with Ireland of the power-sharing agreements of 1998. The two communities may indeed be enduringly suspicious of one another, as the language issue once again shows. But the current London government has all but abdicated from its responsibility to bring them together. In fact it has made things worse.

read the article

The Guardian: The DUP is a party that loves power but hates pesky responsibility

There are few pronouncements from the DUP that can be understood unless heard from the perspective of a DUP stalwart. And this is a party that knows its supporters. Nearly a third of its members are Free Presbyterians – a denomination (founded by the late Ian Paisley) which constitutes just about 0.6% of the population in Northern Ireland.

The DUP is revelling in its moment in the limelight because it has no long-term strategy for Northern Ireland – it has no motivation to have one. In the long-term – so a crude (and I believe misguided) reading of demographic trends would suggest – unionists are outnumbered and thus outvoted into a united Ireland. The DUP perpetuates the idea that unionism’s position is precarious in order to bolster the rationale for its uncompromising stance.

Why sit in Stormont making unpopular decisions about budgets and tedious policy decisions about those schools and hospitals when you can instead concentrate on Westminster? There, at least, you don’t have to share anything with Sinn Féin. And from there you can keep the whole of Europe waiting for you to give a limp thumbs up to Theresa May’s Brexit deal. And yet, the DUP’s decision to shrug off the pesky responsibility of devolved government has a material, crushing effect on Northern Ireland, most particularly on its young.

read the article