Stormont struck dumb as its golden calf melts away
DID you notice the deafening silence from Stormont this week? While the US financial system collapsed, the Republic officially entered recession and 1,000 people lost their jobs in the north, Stormont drifted blissfully along on a wave of economic indifference.
The institution which promised to deal with “bread-and-butter issues” sat silent, as the economic system which determines the prices of bread and butter effectively collapsed. So can the political parties do anything about our economy?
The simple answer is yes but up to now their political beliefs have prevented them from doing so.
The four main assembly parties have pledged loyalty to a political system which believes that government should stand aside and let business run the country. The Good Friday and St Andrew’s agreements contain no reference to powers or procedures which, for example, could influence the price of food, fuel or shelter. The parties were content to leave all that to the private sector, which explains why electricity, gas and house prices are beyond their control. Thus party political debate here has been about how to run the government, not how to run the country. It was an odd decision for some of them. It ran counter to SDLP claims of social democracy, which advocates a much greater degree of government involvement in the economy than exists at present in Britain.For example, the French government largely owns its own electricity industry. This week it bought up all Britain’s nuclear electricity plants.
That’s right, Britain’s nuclear electricity plants are now owned by the French government because the British government, and Stormont, believe that governments should leave such matters to others.
This model fits neatly with the UUP’s conservative politics.
It is difficult to determine how it reflects DUP beliefs, since the party does not appear to have a coherent ideology outside the confines of Northern Ireland’s existence.
For Sinn Fein the decision to support an unregulated free market placed the party firmly in the Thatcherite economic camp.
Apart from the UUP, which is consciously conservative, it is difficult to determine whether the other three parties deliberately opted for Thatcherism or just drifted into it.
However, Thatcher’s belief in an uncontrolled free market became the central plank of the assembly’s economic policy.
For example, the first significant jobs announcement in July last year drew praise from Paisley and McGuinness for Bank of Ireland’s decision to locate some of its hedge fund’s work in Belfast.
Hedge funds have contributed significantly to our economic woes.
They are highly secretive investments open only to wealthy individuals and professional investors.
It emerged this week that one New York-based hedge fund borrowed £300 million worth of shares in Royal Bank of Scotland – Ulster Bank’s parent company – to bet that the bank’s share price would fall dramatically.
To reinforce Paisley and McGuinness’s support for what is known as free market economics, they went to Wall Street and rang the opening bell.
American finance became our new god and Stormont invited its missionaries to a Belfast conference to show that we were already converted.
But something odd happened in America this week. God died. The US financial markets collapsed.
A government which leaves injured people without health insurance on the streets offered $700 billion to bail out banks with no brains. George Bush finally recognised that, left to its own devices, the free market will consume itself with greed.
His disciples in Stormont remained silent. Faced with recession, the Dublin government set out to fix its broken capitalist system. The Celtic Tiger is ill, because Bertie Ahern made no effort to control the scramble for easy money in the property market.
In Limavady 1,000 workers left Seagate for the last time to spend Christmas on the dole. Within days they will face a 30 per cent increase in electricity prices.
Is there a single MLA who will advocate the nationalisation of our electricity industry? Up to now nationalisation has been a dirty word in Stormont but this week George Bush nationalised Wall Street. His former enemy, Vietnamese communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, could not have done it better. Times have changed. Will Stormont now change with them?
As our economic woes and worries continue to build, the assembly parties have two options.
They can either remain silent or say something about the meltdown of their economic philosophy. In the jargon of the system they support, a sensible hedge fund would take an option on them remaining silent for some time.
By Patrick Murphy
www.irishnews.com