A GROUP which represents a wide range of public bodies across the North has written to Secretary of State Chris Heaton-Harris expressing its alarm at the range and extent of “drastic reductions” to services here.

The Public Sector Chairs’ Forum described the recently announced swathe of punishing cutbacks as “neither practical nor cost-effective”, adding that the plan “is jeopardising our ability both to deliver key services and support their essential transformation.” Crucially, the Forum described the threatened devastation of services here as “non-strategic”.

That phrase puts a diplomatic shine on what everyone knows: The devastatingly damaging cuts have not been put forward as a serious and viable solution to the black hole in public finances here, rather they are another crude attempt to force the DUP into restoring the power-sharing institutions.

Not that the DUP should be immune from strong-arm political tactics as they continue to refuse to do the job their MLAs were elected to do. But any robust action aimed at putting pressure on the DUP should do just that – put the squeeze on those responsible for the current mess. What the British Government is doing is the political equivalent of the mass punishments outlawed in conflict by the Geneva Convention. It is not the well-heeled senior members of the leading unionist party who will feel the pinch if and when these shockingly vicious fiscal measures are introduced. It is not those who tell the media they’d prefer to “eat grass” than accept the Protocol – because those people will never know what it is like to suffer financial hardship of the kind that Downing Street proposes to inflict.

It is the sick, the poor and the vulnerable who will pay the price for the DUP’s continuing insistence on staying out of Stormont, which has literally had nothing to do with the perceived wrongs the party claims it wants to put right.

A consensus is building that the DUP will go back into government here. Direct rule is the road to no-town for a party which values its place in the union more than any other thing – a party whose raison d’etre, indeed, is the maintenance of partition. 

We have just been handed a set of budget proposals which masquerades as a bona fide financial repair package, but which is in fact a political punishment beating. Were the DUP to continue their nihilistic self-obsession to the point where the Stormont experiment is terminally damaged, then direct rule for them will be not so much an exercise in paternal government from their benign masters as a series of punitive reminders that defiance of London has its price.

Meanwhile, it is to be hoped that the shock to the system delivered by these financial threats will have a salutary effect on those DUP voters who will be hardest hit by any cuts. They are the ones who will have to “eat grass” and they should let candidates on the doorstep know they’ve no appetite for it.