Owen Polley: The winds of change could blow through the status quo at Stormont

Just weeks ago, some ideas seemed entrenched firmly across the West that now appear decidedly shaky.

The big tech companies are scrambling to distance themselves from fashionable theories about race and gender that they previously celebrated as evidence of their commitment to ‘diversity’. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is pioneering a revolutionary approach to cutting unnecessary government spending.

In the UK, the insurgent Reform party has topped opinion polls and caused panic among Conservatives and Labour alike.

For what it is worth, Nigel Farage is now most bookmakers’ favourite to become the next prime minister. Many previous challenges to the two main parties eventually came to nothing, though, and the same could yet happen to Reform.

It is easy enough to say what the party is against – untrammeled immigration, high taxes, ‘net zero’ environmental policies and everything that is regarded as ‘woke’. It is more difficult to explain in any detail what it believes in.

In last year’s election, the party harnessed voters’ disillusionment with the established parties. Voting for Reform was a way of saying you favoured ‘none of the above’. It helped if you agreed with the party’s claims that neither Labour nor the Conservatives were standing up for their country.

At a recent rally of his supporters, Farage said that Reform stands for “family, community and country”. This sounded like a bland enough statement of conservatism, but his party is still trying to work out what it means in practice, particularly when it comes to issues like economics.

Reform advocated tax cuts in its election manifesto and savaged the chancellor for raising taxes, like national insurance, after the budget. The party, though, seems to include people who are well to the right of the Tories economically, as well as social conservatives who are left wing when it comes to public spending.

If it really is going to challenge both Labour and the Conservatives, as well as taking seats from both, it needs to find a way to balance these instincts. The difficulty for all the parties, but particularly for a populist party like Reform, is that most voters want tax cuts, but favour high-spending from the government too.

Whether Farage manages to reconcile these contradictions, or whether his party fizzles out, we will find out in time. Trump, and now Reform, though, are at least symbols that things change quickly in politics, even when the consensus seems established and cosy.

In Northern Ireland, political trends reach us slowly, but they usually arrive eventually and there may yet be an effective backlash against our failing institutions.

When journalists asked Michelle O’Neill and Emma Little-Pengelly what 12 months of devolution had achieved recently, they struggled to find an answer.

The executive published a draft programme for government last year, but it contained little substance and it is still not signed off. Meanwhile, ministers have made no progress on implementing much-needed public sector reform, even though they handed out pay rises almost immediately.

The NHS is the most glaring example. We have some of the worst waiting lists and health outcomes in the UK, and for years the executive has known broadly what needs to happen to improve the system. Unfortunately, the parties could never agree which services or hospitals to close, so nothing meaningful happened, until a new minister arrived and commissioned another report saying the same thing.

There are many problems that contribute to this inability to get things done.

Devolution encourages parties to carp at Westminster, rather than take responsibility for their own shortcomings. The Stormont system is designed to include Sinn Fein, which not only wants Northern Ireland to fail, but stands opposed to every change that could make the public sector sustainable and let businesses thrive.

Let’s face it though. It’s not all down to them.

While it makes sense for nationalist parties to refuse to take potentially unpopular decisions and blame everything on Westminster, unionist parties often do exactly the same.

In this way, pro-Union politicians often undermine their own position.

On X (formerly Twitter), a unionist blogger and data engineer, Colin Berry, recently advocated unionist parties leaving the executive and exposing its failings from outside. This unionist bloc, he reasoned, could then develop alternative policies to a Sinn Fein/Alliance coalition, ‘drunk on bi-lingualism, net zero and anti-business policies’ by appealing to ‘business professionals, working families and strivers’.

I’ve argued before that a unionist party that is prepared to tell voters the truth could thrive, if it owned up to the difficult trade-offs that governing sometimes involves. This kind of candour would stand in contrast to the executive’s habits of shifting the responsibility for its lack of action and constantly demanding more cash from the Treasury.

It would certainly be a wrench for any unionist party to leave the executive, where they presumably believe they can make an impact. But the truth is that, currently, they seem powerless to drive through the changes we need, or unwilling to do so.

At a time when such radical rethinks are taking place around the world, our leaders should at least be considering their options. Twelve months of devolution has achieved almost nothing, the Irish Sea border is still a standing affront to our constitutional position and their current tactics seem inadequate to the challenge.