AT times like these, most of us would settle for a degree of steadiness and maybe leadership in Ireland, South and North.
In the Dáil, FF and FG have a chokehold on power and they’re never voluntarily going to allow anyone else to replace them as chokeholders-in-chief. The North is a bit more fragile – we’ve gone through protracted periods when our MLAs haven’t been around, and like a school when the principal is off, things managed to stagger on in more or less the same way.
Not that there’s any inspiration to be found across the water. For a nation that prides itself on its quiet reasonableness (Have a cup of tea, luv, and we’ll sort it all out), British politics have in recent years gone a bit mad.
First we had the Tories playing dominoes with their leaders. In 2016, David Cameron called a Brexit referendum and to his consternation lost it. Then, doing a poor imitation of Seán Mac Diarmada, who whistled softly as he made his way towards the point of execution, Cameron walked away from the Downing Street microphone humming softly.
Theresa May, God help her, tried to tidy up the Brexit debris and for three years went from one failure to the next. After that it was Boris Johnson, blundering about breaking things, including unionist hearts, before losing his job. And who could forget Liz Truss, who was outlasted by a head of lettuce? Then we got Rishi Sunak, who struggled with inflation and immigration disputes, then handed Labour a huge majority.
Surely Sir Keir and his Labour party would bring some order and growth. Alas, Starmer looks very much as if his goose is cooked as Andy Burnham rides over the horizon on his white horse. But what happens if Burnham’s white horse picks up an injury or throws its rider? With Andy left sprawling, will we be stuck with Keir and his talk-your-weight machine voice, still dismissing appeals for some extra funding?
Schadenfreude, as the Germans say. You’d think that people might learn from the mistakes of those who preceded them, but that doesn’t seem to be the way in British politics. Each PM devises his or her own death-trap and then jumps into it.
Self-evidently, Britain is a mess. Stand back and you’ll see the immediate mess is surrounded by a bigger mess. The United Kingdom is straining at the joints. The ruling SNP in Scotland can’t wait to get out of their UK cell and run their own affairs. Even Wales, the home of that ardent UK leader Lloyd George (the toilets are just down the hall, Virginia), is now led by a party that wants to get out of the wretched UK. As, of course does NEI. Sad to say, none of these has the courage to call for a referendum that would let them shed their chains, Instead they just grumble and hope that time will carry them to the state of independence they all crave.
But chin up. Cue intro and let’s hear you after three:
Things can only get better…
