I Want Apple Crumble!

I make no bones about it, and readily confess that apple crumble is by far my favourite dessert dish.  As a virtually self-taught and very limited cook, it's one that I can manage quite well, with the help of a proprietary brand of crumble mix, an ever-present item in my store cupboard.

Switch on your imagination for a moment, dear reader.  Imagine that, instead of blazing this desire abroad in a blog, I had announced my wishes to a loving and supportive wife.  Imagine further that her response was "But we haven't any apples, darling."  Imagine even further my rejoinder: "That's all right, dear, we've got lots of eggs."  Depending on factors outwith this hypothetical narrative, the outcome would be anything within the range from sympathetic laughter, to "don't be silly!", to grounds for divorce.

This weekend the second-class citizens of this country, who happen to live in Northern Ireland, have been told that they will soon be filing into the polling stations to elect a new Assembly.  Why?  Basically it's because the existing Assembly has been unable to appoint a Speaker and therefore is unable to operate the democratic institution to which its members have been elected.

The Northern Ireland Secretary in Westminster has looked in the store cupboard of legislation, found the shelf where there are instructions for what to do when an Assembly has been unable to govern and - apparently without looking any further - has said 'Ah yes, well you've had six months to try, you'll have to have another election.' Solution provided, problem solved, next business please.  

Only it isn't ... and it won't be.  

The reason the present Assembly has been unable to operate is not that it couldn't come to a decision, but that one party has stubbornly - but possibly with good cause - refused to take part in any discussion towards that decision.  There's little indication that the outcome of a new election will be very different from the present Assembly, and when it's all done and dusted, the new Assembly will face the same problem as the old.  Does the population have to wait another six months with no one to take important and increasingly urgent decisions in the government of the country ... only to face another unproductive - and very expensive - election?

The underlying problem, as Sir Geoffrey Donaldson (DUP leader) succinctly stated on BBC R4's Today programme yesterday, is that, so long as the present arrangements for trade between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK result in a tariff being charged on goods crossing the Irish Sea, the people of Northern Ireland will remain at a financial disadvantage compared to their fellows in Great Britain or, as he put it, 'be second-class citizens' of a supposedly United Kingdom.  Whether or not he and his party are right to hold his countrymen hostage in this way and deprive them of normal government for months on end is, to some extent, a separate question.

The Secretary of State has to remove his blinkers and realise that eggs won't make an apple crumble.  If he - or his colleagues in the Westminster government - don't address the fundamental difficulty (no apples), no progress will be made, however many eggs (or elections) he provides, in the production of apple crumble (stable and effective government).

I wrote here recently about the basic impossibility of squaring the circle of Northern Ireland, Brexit and the resulting need for a border somewhere.  I don't propose to repeat that here.  What I will say is that to me - and I expect to thousands of others - the solution is blindingly obvious, and one that would resolve other difficulties at the same time.  The UK must seek to re-join the Single Market and Customs Union, the severance from which, as part of Brexit, caused the need for a border in the first place.