The politics of conflict resolution and peace building are rooted in an ability to invest patience in complexity. A lack of patience and understanding leads to ill-judged and ill-advised public policy decisions and has too often been true for Northern Ireland, since it was created almost one hundred years ago.
As the challenge of bringing prosperity and stability to Northern Ireland moves from Labour to the Conservative and Liberals, I hope they exercise great care in understanding Northern Ireland in the way that Labour did.
Looking specifically at one clause of one sentence in one bullet point of the coalition agreement, I have my doubts.
“We will work to bring Northern Ireland back into the mainstream of UK politics”.
The devil here will be in the implementation.
Tories and Liberals have never really had a successful track record of conflict resolution in Northern Ireland. It wasn’t until Peter Brookes, secretary of state for Northern Ireland in the Major government announced that the British government had “no selfish strategic interest” in Northern Ireland that real progress began.
Brookes continued, “It is not the aspiration to a sovereign, united Ireland against which we set our face, but its violent expression.”
This mature, carefully considered understanding that Northern Ireland is not part of the normal politics of the UK has guided British government thinking since. Until now it seems.
In Northern Ireland, most voters’ first choice at the ballot box isn’t between tax models, welfare provisions or politics “as normal” in the rest of the UK. The choice is usually which nationalism do you prefer, Irish nationalism or British nationalism? Every election acts as a gauge of how much support there is for retaining the Union with Britain or for joining with the Republic of Ireland.
The political parties in Northern Ireland therefore split along these lines with various degrees of extremity towards different nationalist or unionist positions. Social and economic concerns are secondary to the fundamental crux of this ethnonational debate. That is why Northern Ireland doesn’t operate in the “mainstream of UK politics” and it is precisely why it should be treated with care when making policy in Westminster about politics in Stormont.
Of course we shouldn’t be churlish about any move towards ensuring that politics as normal does come about in Northern Ireland. When Northern Irish politics is dominated by discussions about water rates, housing policy, integrated education, job creation and even sex scandals then clearly progress is being made. However, the key to unlocking positive and normative political dialogue is understanding and working with, not against, the grain of the underlying and dominant discourse.
But any party that says it would impose Westminster cut-and-thrust politics on Northern Ireland ignores the premise upon which Northern Ireland now operates. The consensual system of the Stormont assembly may not be politics as normal to Westminster, but it sure is a lot better than most of the politics which preceded it.
Labour should be very proud of how it understood and tackled the myriad challenges a UK government faces in Northern Ireland. The signal from the Tories and Liberals that they wish to return to the politics of the ‘tyranny of the majority’ ignores the patience and understanding which paved the way for the Downing Street Declaration, ceasefires, talks, the Good Friday and St Andrew’s Agreements and a working Assembly for Northern Ireland.
Put bluntly if David Cameron and Nick Clegg put UK unionism before British pragmatism, Northern Ireland could well be back in mainstream news, but not in mainstream politics.