Timid Stormont fails to give target dates for easing of lockdown
One of most troubling aspects of yesterday’s timid Stormont Covid plan is that the only dissenting voice in the assembly was Jim Allister.
Again and again, on a range of issues, questionable things happen and the TUV leader is the only person to say anything against them.
On this occasion Mr Allister has pointed out the painfully obvious yet ignored point that the devolved regions are “very happy to be in lockstep with Westminster” when it comes to Treasury funding yet is at odds over lockdown.
Mr Allister then talks about the need to have “an economy left after it is all over”.
“I regret that there was not a greater urgency in today’s plan to the resuscitation of our economy,” he said.
There has been no urgency. While republicans are fixated on having a different approach to Great Britain, there has been no wider gratitude towards London, which has just announced the extension of the extraordinarily generous and almost ruinously expensive furlough scheme.
Yet we have no target dates for emergence for lockdown.
No idea of when those brave people who started up businesses can expect to return to trading.
No proper timeframe of when people can get a haircut, or get some pleasure from watching a sporting game remotely.
No explanation of why schools can’t reopen before autumn and maybe not fully even then, unlike England in June.
No explanation of why teachers have just got a pay rise while the schools remain shut and civil servants have got one too, while no state employees face massive hardship.
And why are unionists (apart from Mr Allister and a handful of others) not up in arms about an approach to Treasury funding that could be seen as almost exploitative?
Some of those politicians use social media and should have noticed that English voices are spotting the ‘go slow’ response in the devolved regions. Such thinking will grow and damage the Union, but delight separatists in Scotland in NI.