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MIKE TOMLINSON: The health crisis is our crisis

THE latest corruptions of democracy swirling around Westminster should not distract us from the intensifying crises in public services, especially health, none of which look like going away soon. The state of the NHS is so bad that radical alternatives to the free-at-the-point-of-use model are openly debated. The voices of private provision get louder and “solutions” such as rationing through fees are getting serious air time. Former chancellor (for six months), Sajid Javid, has even suggested that Britain should be more like Ireland (26 counties) and introduce charges for seeing a GP and for attending A&E without a GP referral. The trouble with the NHS, he wrote in The Times, was that “the only rationing mechanism is to make people wait”. Apply the market mechanism of charges and – bingo! – the queues at emergency departments and for GP appointments magically disappear. Shows how much he knows about Ireland.

MIKE TOMLINSON: Living standards shape good health outcomes and life expectancy

MOST new year resolutions are related to mental and physical health: see more of family and friends, get less stressed at work, drink less or even not at all in January, eat less sugar and junk food, and above all exercise more. We know what’s good for us even if we don’t always have the resources – financial and social – to make adjustments to our lifestyles.

MIKE TOMLINSON: The road-to-nowhere DUP

THREE days before the deadline for restoring the Executive, Deirdre Hargey’s Department for Communities published a report by an independent advisory panel reviewing welfare mitigation schemes. This report is not part of an anti-poverty strategy as such, but it does discuss measures designed to mitigate some of the worst effects of the British Government’s ‘welfare reforms’ of the past decade. The immediate crisis of energy costs and inflation is another matter.

MIKE TOMLINSON: Who voted for this?

THE most important message from the Tory Party conference last week came from Ami McCarthy and Rebecca Newsom who work for Greenpeace. During prime minister Liz Truss’ speech, they held up a banner asking, “Who voted for this?”. Anticipating that the angry men surrounding them would snatch the banner – as indeed they did – Ami and Rebecca had come with a couple of back-up banners. “Let’s get them removed” was the prime minister’s response – and she wasn’t referring to the banners. It didn’t take the Daily Mail long to carry out background checks. It discovered from Facebook posts that Ami “is no stranger to controversy”, as a couple of years ago, “she mounted an attack on British foreign policy”, arguing that the British Army had “ruin[ed] most of the world”. Some suggested that Truss “handled it well” but unfortunately for her, even Tory die-hards like Nadine Dorries were repeating the Greenpeace message: there was no mandate for the Truss agenda, so an election must be called. It is a measure of the division, chaos and incompetence within Downing Street that Truss even vetoed a small plan from Rees-Mogg’s department to encourage everyone to save energy this winter. But back to Dorries, the post-truth former Culture Secretary who backed Truss for Tory leader. It was Dorries who decided that Channel Four should be privatised because she thought, wrongly, it was “in receipt of public money”. C4 is funded commercially but publicly owned. Its crime is that it hosts the only news programme worth watching on British TV, one that is routinely boycotted by government ministers. No wonder Dorries lasted only twelve months in post (though Truss wanted her to stay on).

MIKE TOMLINSON: A tale of two budgets on both sides of the Irish Sea

WELL. Close your eyes for a bit and the world is even more bonkers when you open them up again. It’s budget time, on both sides of the Irish Sea, only the right-wing English nationalists don’t call their latest shake of the magic money tree (£45 billion) a ‘budget’. That would involve a legally-defined process in which the Office of Budgetary Responsibility looks over your figures and predicts how they will shape economic growth, public services and employment. That’s far too rational for the Britannia Unchained crew. The new occupants of Nos. 10 and 11 Downing Street have no need for the OBR. They have no need for the most experienced civil servant at the Treasury (permanent secretary Tom Scholar), summarily dismissed as one of the first decisions of the new regime. They have no need for a sugar tax, an obesity strategy or a ban on junk food adverts. They even have no need for the Tory manifesto of 2019 which pledged to halt fracking until it could be proven safe. They have no mandate for what they are doing. While it’s early days yet, all the signs are that the latest British government has no need for evidence either. It looks like ‘evidence-based policy’ is so last century. They even seem to be leaving behind ‘policy-based evidence’ (which involves selecting the evidence that supports the policy you want to follow). Move on everyone! Welcome to the era of ‘evidence-free policy’, which means, primarily, following your beliefs. Key advisors and Truss’s chief of staff are drawn from the Tufton Street gang of right wing lobbyists, including the Tax Payers’ Alliance, the Institute of Economic Affairs, and the Adam Smith Institute (plus the Global Warming Policy Foundation and Migration Watch), all funded by who knows who, a.k.a. ‘dark money’.

POLITICS: Spectators at the Carnival of Inaction?

Thanks to The S*n’s political correspondent, Natasha Clark, we now know what the key issues are in the election for the next occupant of 10 Downing Street. Issues, that is, for the micro-electorate of Tory MPs (stage one) and Tory party members (stage two) who will decide who gets to inherit that very expensive wallpaper (£840-a-roll) which keeps peeling off.

Tipping point: Johnson undermines the peace process

IT feels like we are at a tipping point, or at least a crunch point – again. It is often said that the Johnson government has no real policies but just an agenda based on culture wars and issues that are simply designed to polarise opinion, so-called “wedge issues”: selling Channel 4, promoting imperial units and the union flag, denying racism, protecting statues, routine attacks on the BBC, “lefty lawyers” and judges – note the defamation proceedings issued in the wake of Brandon Lewis’ latest attack – and generally purging institutions of the ideologically “unsound”.

MIKE TOMLINSON: Irish Unity debate - separating the facts from unionism's wishful thinking

Last week saw the publication of yet another research report looking at north/south comparisons. Funded by the Department of the Taoiseach’s Shared Island Unit, the Economic and Social Research Institute examined education and training in what is – astonishingly – “the first study to systematically compare the systems from primary to tertiary levels”. Among other things, the ESRI finds that early school leaving is two to three times higher in the North compared to the South and this gap has widened over time. It also finds “marked differences in educational attainment between Ireland and Northern Ireland, with a lower proportion of the population in Ireland having the lowest levels of educational attainment”. As for North/South interaction and cooperation, the links are “ad hoc in nature and based on individual relationships or specific projects and initiatives, thus making sustained co-operation more challenging”. Such research is one example of the growing body of resources looking at north/south comparisons and the issues raised by discussions of Irish unity. Ireland’s Future, for example, has published seven reports, the latest of which is on ‘Rights, Citizenship and Identity in a United Ireland’.

MIKE TOMLINSON: The difficulty of putting crimes against humanity on trial

WAR crimes. Genocide. Crimes against humanity. The crime of aggression. These concepts of the international legal order, established in the era of the prosecution of Nazi leaders at Nuremburg, are once again part of everyday conversation. Ukrainian President Zelenskiy is having a good deal of success in mobilising powerful countries and not-so-powerful countries in activating these human rights concepts to address the actions of Putin’s forces.

MIKE TOMLINSON: Fall-out from war will be felt keenest by less well-off

As if Brexit, Covid and the climate emergency were not enough, along comes Putin’s war against Ukraine. The human tragedy of destroyed lives, homes and whole cities ripples out into the displacement of millions within Ukraine and refugees crossing European borders in search of sanctuary – for how long, no-one knows. We are back to the gruesome business of war crimes and fights over the destruction of evidence and witnesses to what is occurring. The ripples go far beyond the war zone, of course. There is a price to pay for the imposition of economic sanctions against individuals closely associated with the Putin regime and against the Russian economy itself. Most immediately these measures impact on the world markets for gas and oil, causing a surge in inflation and an anticipated interruption of supplies of many commodities including food if this year’s crops cannot be sown or harvested due to the war.

ECONOMICS OF UNITY: Irish Times gets it wrong on United Ireland pensions policy

The most commented on opinion column in the Irish Times last week was a piece headlined, 'No, the UK will not pay a united Ireland’s pensions' (10 February). Underneath this was a strapline which read, 'Pinning the Bill and the blame on the Brits stirs grievance in the North'. While we should never blame the columnist for the editor’s choice of eye-catching captions, these headlines did in fact represent the general drift of the article. How could a discussion of responsibility for the pensions of northerners when Ireland is unified be accused of stirring grievance and Brit-bashing? It is true that the British state pension is low by international standards and pensioner poverty relatively high. It is also true that the nominal value of the British state pension is significantly below the Irish state pension, and that the average amount of state pension paid per beneficiary in the Republic is over a quarter more than in the UK (Eurostat, latest available figures). But these were not the issues under discussion. The point of the article was to argue that the economic case for unity is built on a "bluff" and "fantasy" that Britain would be “paying another country’s benefits for half a century”, notably “the £2.5 billion state pension bill”. The final, emotive flourish was, “Republicans ask us to wade through blood, but will not ask us to open our wallets”. There will be many financial issues to sort out in any unity scenario, social security being a major one as it accounts for 40 per cent of the north’s expenditure; and about 42 per cent of this social security expenditure goes on state retirement pensions (£3.3 billion in 2019/20). So how would this be dealt with? The starting point is European law and any agreements that have been made because of Brexit. The Irish and British governments signed a bilateral Convention on Social Security in 2019 which came into effect on 31 December 2020. This more or less replicates the established European framework for determining pensions in cases where people are resident in a different country from the country (or countries) where they worked – or the situation where someone is resident in the country they worked in, but also had spells of employment elsewhere. Social or national insurance is essentially a contract between the individual worker and the state: the worker contributes and becomes eligible for benefits, both short-term (e.g. for periods of unemployment) and long-term (e.g. retirement pensions, survivors’ benefits and invalidity pensions). It is ‘social’ because the ‘risks’ are shared.

MIKE TOMLINSON: DUP numbers just don't add up

LET'S be optimistic. Let’s assume the Assembly still exists at the end of 2024, has put the health service back on its feet, and is getting its head round the practicalities of building a national health service and other public services across a unifying Ireland.

MIKE TOMLINSON: Another prop-up-the-union project has backfired

WHILE the Minister for the Union nurses his long and heavy party hangover, and sets up yet another inquiry into Tory party anti-‘Muslimness’, the House of Lords’ Committee on the Constitution was putting the finishing touches to its latest report, Respect and Co-operation: Building a Stronger Union for the 21st century. The report says the union is in a fragile state and current attempts to shore it up are often top down and insensitive to the views of devolved authorities, including English regions and local government. It takes a deep dive into what the union means, what is wrong with it and what might be done to fix it. In case you hadn’t noticed, preserving the union has become a more active and self-conscious area of British government policy-making in recent years, so some scrutiny is in order. Union policy is Sue Gray’s day job when she is not breathalysing workers in Downing Street. The report is a good deal more reflective than the defence of the union we are used to from the pages of the News Letter, or from the leaders of political unionism. This typically involves attacking nationalism and individuals expressing a nationalist perspective, rather than anything of substance that goes beyond asserting the union as a principle and the natural order of things. In a similar, negative and backward-looking vein, the historian Ruth Dudley Edwards participated in a unity debate hosted by irishborderpoll.com last week in which she argued: a) the south doesn’t want unity, b) the north won’t vote for it in the near future, if ever, and c) the whole debate is a Sinn Féin conspiracy. Not long ago she wrote: “Sinn Féin is a cancer on both sides of the border, a powerful cult that is run from behind the scenes by the IRA Army Council.” She wrote this after the passing of John Hume (3 August 2020), a ‘tribute’ to his “appalling misjudgement” of engaging in the peace process with Gerry Adams.

MIKE TOMLINSON: Unionists form a circular firing squad in new culture war offensive

Last week’s Hoey hoo-hah rumbles on. Baroness Hoey wrote the foreword in the latest pamphlet from the Unionist Voice Policy Studies (UVPS) group published last week. The pamphlet is less ‘policy studies’ and more an attempt to make a legal argument for how and why the implementation of the protocol must be prevented.

MIKE TOMLINSON: Twin headaches of Covid and Brexit will torment beleaguered Tories in 2022

2021 was supposed to be the year for two things to end and for one thing to become more under control but which would stick around more or less permanently. Brexit was to be done and dusted, and the pandemic would be conquered by vaccines. But Brexit is far from done, whichever side of the Irish sea you look, and the Covid-19 virus seems able to adapt and outpace vaccine development and deployment.

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Prof Mike Tomlinson

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