Belfast: looking backwards to the future

The thing about being a blogger, particularly one who inhabits X, is that you eventually reach a point where you’ve seen every possible permutation of every mainstream opinion, and most of the fringe ones too. You can tell just by some of the vocabulary what you’re in for without going any deeper. It’s why I sound so jaded these days. I’m craving for somebody to tell me something I don’t already know. I get seriously bored of watching the same old people recycling the same old talking points and tedious rhetoric. It is something of a delight, then, to read this latest piece on the disturbances in Belfast by Sara Morrison. You should read every word of it.

The piece puts me in a difficult spot as far as blogging goes in that it cannot be filleted or harvested for quotes. It’s the full picture that matters here. While it’s a tale of deindustrialisation and working class displacement, similar to many places in the North of England, it runs concurrently with legacy traumas from the Troubles, exacerbated by mass immigration, giving rise to a more acute identity crisis.

Here, if you’ll allow me a short digression, I’d suggest Northern Ireland isn’t exactly unique in terms of a disintegrating social fabric. Thanks to recent years of mass immigration, where there is nothing discernibly British for new arrivals to integrate into, coupled with increasing levels of white flight, we are seeing the integration process go into reverse, with third and fourth generation migrants looking to their own ethnic heritage for a sense of identity and belonging. We’re human. Reversion to tribe is instinctive in these times of insecurity and instability.

Of particular significance in Sara Morrison’s blog, though, is this…

"And Brexit is a live constitutional wound, not ancient history. The protocol, the Windsor Framework, the endless negotiation over what Northern Ireland actually is, all of it landed hardest on unionist working-class communities who voted to leave and found themselves in a different constitutional arrangement to the rest of the UK almost overnight. The sense of abandonment hasn’t gone away, and nobody in power has offered them an honest answer about where they stand.

Here is what almost nobody with a platform in this place is willing to say. A certain kind of liberal political culture in Northern Ireland has spent thirty years treating unionist working-class communities as either a punchline or a problem to be managed. The fuck-the-DUP aesthetic was fashionable for a long time. Mocking unionism, treating loyalist culture as inherently ridiculous, performing exasperation at people who voted the wrong way, all of it was socially acceptable in the circles that produce our commentariat and our political class, and the people on the receiving end noticed, the way people always notice when they are being condescended to.

Leave voters will be all too familiar with that elite condescension but it goes double for Unionists who were deceived and misled throughout Brexit by the Tories then shoved aside when they were no longer useful.

This is important because the Protocol was always a technocratic fudge to shelve the issue, and we've left it to rot ever since - because nobody wants to spend the political capital on a definitive solution - and nobody wants the headaches that go with revisiting it. Northern Ireland was not supposed to be a feature of Brexit negotiations. Prior to triggering Article 50, it was only ever seen by Brexiteers as a fly in the ointment, rather than a constitutional dilemma that could derail the entire enterprise.

The problem is that this stasis born of political indifference cannot stand, especially when so many other factors are exacerbating the underlying tensions (not least mass immigration). It is only a matter of time before the existing settlement runs out of road. Constitutionally, NI is neither fish nor fowl, left to rot, and now suffers the indignity of having the third world dumped on their doorstep while having no say in it. A collapse of the existing settlement is a rapidly approaching inevitability.

In particular, the British right is resolved to leave the ECHR, without clarifying the status of the GFA, and whether once again Northern Ireland will be asked to swallow yet another legal bodge that further separates it from the UK. We're just pretending that problem doesn't exist. There are legal, technical and moral questions pertaining to NI that go with leaving the ECHR, which the the British right glosses over because the search for definitive answers would be too much like thinking.

The people on the ground know too well that all the issues (which were never properly resolved in 1997 and 2019) will once again come to the fore, and Unionists know that they will again be last in the pecking order. Nobody on the right has the decency to give them a straight answer about their constitutional future, while the left wing parties offer nothing but more of the same decay and neglect. NI will soon become a nexus point where the every political actor on all sides will have a go at stirring the pot, and the results will be explosive.

At this point, I am far out of my depth as a commentator in that I lack the intimate understanding of Irish political tectonic plates, but I know enough to know that all is not well south of the border either. Ireland’s liberal establishment is a light years out of step with the public, while the republic has its own nascent nativist movement in common with most European nations.

In the event that Britain pulls the trigger on ECHR withdrawal, it is likely that the Irish government will seek to frustrate the proceedings for its own cynical purposes, possibly even attempting to stoke traditional divisions - right about the time when Ireland’s underclass on either side of the border has more in common in terms of their opposition to mass migration. Meanwhile, Ireland’s liberal immigration policy sees many north of the border calling for a hard border.

I can’t even begin to predict how all that unfolds politically, and wouldn’t be arrogant enough to try and make sense of it, but we can say that’s it’s going to be a royal mess, and this time around, it is unlikely that Unionists will meekly consent to yet another technical fudge that leaves them in a constitutional state of limbo. If, then, that calls for a wider unravelling of the Brexit settlement and the GFA, then there’s the intractable and dangerous question of what replaces it, and where the EU stands in all of this.

My own reading of the ECHR situation is that we should leave it well alone in that it simply isn’t necessary to quit it just to get a grip on our asylum problems - but that also ducks the issue of a failing settlement in Northern Ireland. Unlike the early 2000s, this is not something that can be glossed over with regeneration and political bungs. We’re looking at a more permanent state of disorder that will only intensify if immigration is not brought under control.

The concern here is that this is a little understood problem, for which there are no obvious solutions, which the intellectual pygmies of Reform haven’t even begun to grapple with, whose understanding of the Brexit settlement was never all that great to begin with. If the Farage clan (under guidance from Braverman) approaches ECHR withdrawal with the same witlessness and arrogance as they approached Brexit, then this could easily blow up in their faces - regardless of whether the immigration problem abates.

On a few occasions, now, I’ve attempted to start a debate on how all this plays out politically, but there’s been no takers. Much of it is unknown and unknowable, but the frightening part is the lack of interest in finding out.