The politics of Northern Ireland are
complex, and it’s generally a mistake to ascribe an outbreak
of violence to a single cause in a society where two different identities sit uneasily together
in the same space. It’s easy enough for politicians to condemn ‘lawlessness’,
but that lawlessness never exists in isolation from political events and
debate. It is doubtful, though, that the failure of the police to conduct mass
arrests of republicans over attendance at a funeral in apparent breach of Covid
regulations would be enough in most contexts to spark off the sort of violence
which has erupted in recent days, were it not for underlying tension. And it
is clear that at least some of that tension is a direct result of a Brexit deal
which leads some to feel that their British identity is under threat – the sort
of threat which a carefully negotiated and implemented Good Friday agreement had
managed largely to assuage for decades.
It’s too facile simply to blame a Brexit
deal negotiated by careless ideologues who ignored all the warnings about the impact
on the delicate balance which had been put in place, but it would also be facile
to pretend that deliberately introducing an element of instability into that
delicate balance has had no effect. Calculated and persistent dishonesty
about the impact of the agreement which they negotiated merely rubs salt in the
wound. The tone-deaf approach of the current UK government continues to
exacerbate rather than improve the situation. The PM said yesterday that “The
way to resolve differences is through dialogue…”, and just a few days ago,
Lord Frost, Johnson’s Brexit negotiator, said that it
is difficult to see how the NI Protocol can be "genuinely durable"
without the consent of "all of the people" of NI. Well, yes to
both of those – and won’t both men be furious with whoever decided to negotiate
a deal which involved neither dialogue with nor the consent of the people and
parties of Northern Ireland?
Of course they won’t; it didn’t occur to
them in advance that they needed any such dialogue or consent, and what they
mean by the words now is that those on whom the deal has been imposed need to
listen to what they’re told and then give their consent to what has been
imposed upon them. And as a fallback, they can always blame the EU for actually
wanting to implement the agreement to which the UK signed up. It’s the sort of cavalier
attitude to the opinions of others which one might expect from a world king, and underlies
the approach which the PM takes towards the Welsh and Scottish legislatures as
well, to say nothing of the House of Commons, where he regularly lies and
misleads. Absolute monarchy means that other views can be disregarded and
overridden at will.
History tells us that absolute monarchy as
a method of government often works rather well, from the point of view of the
absolute monarch at least. Until it doesn’t, at which point there is a distinct
tendency for the absolute monarch’s head to become physically separated from
the rest of his body. One of the few historical certainties about absolute
monarchies is that they always end, and they often do so rapidly and
unexpectedly. Messy endings aren’t quite such a historical certainty, but they
are the norm. To return to where we began; the event which sparks the end may
be something relatively inconsequential in itself (such as, in this case, a
failure to comply with Covid regulations), but it is the underlying resentment
and anger which turns a spark into a conflagration. It’s hard to say what Johnson’s
spark will be or when it will come, but his dogmatic, mendacious, and arrogant approach
means that he’s certainly building up a good pile of tinder.
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