THE announcement this week that pharma company Almac are to create 1,000 jobs across the North is a welcome piece of good news at a time when good news is in desperately short supply.
The DUP welcomed the “fantastic news” but neglected to point out that the company has been – as reported by the BBC’s John Campbell – promoting the Protocol as its “Almac advantage”. The BBC’s economics and business editor also pointed out that “Among big NI firms Almac has probably been the most explicit about what it sees as the upside of the Protocol”.
And there it is. A 24-carat example of a company dependent on frictionless UK-EU trade benefiting mightily from a Protocol which was put in place to mitigate the worst effects of the disastrous hard Brexit vigorously pursued by the DUP. For DUP political reps west of the Bann, where Almac has its main headquarters, news of the jobs boost presents a very ticklish problem. Ahead of next May’s Assembly elections, 1,000 jobs will look very well on election leaflets, but with non-unionist parties being able to point to the Protocol as the midwife of the economic fillip, it’s a development that they will approach with considerable circumspection.
Rather than exploit the now blindingly obvious benefits of the Protocol, unionist leaders continue to insist on parity of deprivation with their British neighbours, who are staring at empty shelves and sewage-rich rivers and seas as a result of the difficulties presented to the retail and water sectors by Brexit.
Inevitably, tough talk by unionist politicians has led to further violence on the streets, with more vehicles burned in loyalist areas of the city. The impact of the announcement by the UVF-linked PUP this week that there was no longer any basis for unionist support for the Good Friday Agreement was seriously diluted by an utterly confused and confusing subsequent explanation on BBC Radio Ulster by party leader Billy Hutchinson. But it added to the growing conviction that unionism is embarked upon a nihilistic path of threats and name-calling designed more with an eye to inflaming unionist and loyalist passions to the extent that it will turn next spring’s elections – should we reach them – into a sectarian dogfight which hardline unionism relishes and from which it has reaped a rich return in the past.
It appears that DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson may be spared the embarrassment of issuing another threat to collapse the political institutions by a UK move to trigger Article 16, although with Tory grandees urging No.10 to think again and the EU preparing what will almost certainly be a punitive response, it’s still possible that this is just the latest bluff by the increasingly preposterous Lord Frost in his hold-me-back school playground hard man act.
Meanwhile, loyalist paramilitaries are getting a lot of attention for little outlay and the danger is that the law of diminishing returns will bring escalation. And with no prospect of a meaningful move by political unionism to turn down the heat, Christmas may be quite a bit less festive this year.
