NICK GARBUTT: No votes for Conservatism in NI
THE Conservative Party might well be in government but it faces enormous challenges.
It is still seen as a party of wealth and privilege, a party for the haves, and most definitely not for the have-nots. One manifestation of this is that although it is in power, its powerbase is very much confined to England.
In Scotland it trails behind the SNP and Labour and in Wales it secured just eight out of 40 seats in the last General Election. In Northern Ireland it has the grand total of no elected representatives. The Scottish Assembly is run by the SNP, the Welsh Assembly by Labour and here, of course the Tories form no part of government, except by providing us with a secretary of state.
Conservatives are unionists and their weakness outside of England is a serious and obvious concern for them. This was one of the reasons why Margaret Thatcher opposed devolution – she believed that it would create centres of opposition that would ultimately lead to the break up of the United Kingdom.
Twenty years after she said that there are warning signs, the SNP is resurgent and in power in Scotland and there is growing talk of excluding Scottish (and presumably Welsh and Northern Irish MPs) from voting on purely English issues – the so-called West Lothian question.
We have recently seen attempts to revitalise the Conservative Party in Scotland and even talk of re-branding it. In Scotland even Tories believe that the Conservative Party name is so toxic it cannot hope to win mass support.
In this context it is hardly surprising that the Conservatives have been attempting to merge with the Ulster Unionists. And if the merger were with the Conservative Party as a whole rather than with the Northern Ireland Conservatives (elected members nil), then there might be a certain logic to it from the unionists’ perspective.
The Ulster Unionists need funding, party discipline, real focus and a coherent policy agenda, all of which would be available in such a scenario.
However all this ignores a basic fundamental. There are no votes in Conservatism in Northern Ireland.
Current Tory policy is based on balancing rigorous public spending cuts with stimulating the private sector. The idea is that, over a comparatively short period of time, the economy becomes re-balanced with job losses in the public sector more than off-set by gains in the private sector and cuts to welfare forcing people on benefits to take up employment.
All the evidence to date suggests that whilst these policies might work very well in areas where the economy is reasonably well balanced (the South East of England, for example), they don’t and can’t work in areas where there is a very high dependency on the public sector.
Northern Ireland has the highest dependency on the public sector in the UK, it accounts for 70 per cent of the economy – that’s worse than that for the People’s Republic of China or even the old Soviet Union.
Re-balancing our economy is going to take a lot more than firing a load of civil servants and expecting our tiny private sector to find work for them. Because of the sheer scale of the public sector here, every other part of the economy is totally dependent upon it. Cut civil servants’ expenses and they will stop having coffee and lunch in our bars and restaurants, harming the private sector. Cut spending on construction programmes and you put construction workers out of work.
Whether the present government is right or wrong in its assessment of the economy and its remedies for its ailments, one thing is certain: the impacts on Northern Ireland will be negative. When we come to the next elections here, whether for Westminster of our local Assembly, you would be very foolish indeed to enter them bearing the standard of the Conservative Party, there will be no votes in that. We can safely predict that at the next Assembly elections the Conservative Party will have no MLAs. If the Unionists had jumped into bed with them, they might have suffered a similar fate.
There’s more too. In 1997 Margaret Thatcher wrote an article for The Scotsman newspaper in which she said: “Certainly, the majority of English MPs would have little sympathy for the predicament of a Scotland that had its own assembly and its own tax-raising powers when it came to the distribution of public money. And within the Cabinet, the ability of the Secretary of State for Scotland to argue persuasively for Scottish interest would be radically diminished, since he would have no responsibility for most Scottish services, and, for that matter, no obvious function at all. “
And when you think about it why should a party which is pretty much entirely dependent on English votes to get into power give priority and precedence to regions where it can win few votes – and isn’t that especially the case of a region where it hasn’t got a single political representative?
* Nick Garbutt is managing director of Asitis Consulting
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Adamwilliam
Friday, January 6, 2012 at 06:26 PMNick Garbutt England is right to not want to keep on sending billions to NI each and every year to keep up to 70% of the economy dependent on the the public sector. Even China & Cuba are encouraging the private sector. NI had better wake up pretty darn soon as English people like their elected UK government would be fully within their rights to want to stop the handouts to NI.
JAC MCKEON
Thursday, January 5, 2012 at 07:00 PMNick Garbutt has succinctly made the the case for the Conservative party establishing in Northern Ireland that many are now increasingly advocating. Altho' he appears not to have realised it. In quoting Thatcher's 1997 comment to the effect that an English dominated Conservative cabinet is unlikely to look generously on Regions in which the local populace refuses to vote or elect Conservative representatives, he is acknowledging the understandably hard facts of life. And politics are certainly no different. This is a fact that an increasing number of people in N.I. are coming to realise. Especially with N.I.'s dependency on the Westminster annual subsidy. If you're not at the table (as we currently aren't) when the decisions are being made thro' your own fault. Then don't come crying about suffering the consequences.
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