Arlene’s old attitudes leading DUP nowhere
Posted By: May 24, 2017
The DUP has gone backward under Arlene Foster’s leadership. Picture
by Brian Lawless/PA Wire.
Brian Feeney. Irish News. Belfast. Wednesday, May 24, 2017
THEY say generals fight the last war and officers spend peace time studying the tactics of the victories of the last war.
The same is true of economists and political leaders, none more so than Arlene Foster as evidenced by her speech on Monday to the right wing Bruges Group – old hat.
She attacked Jeremy Corbyn for stuff he said 30 years ago about the IRA, belatedly grabbing the ramshackle bandwagon the Conservatives dragged out to distract from the disastrous policy on social care Theresa May announced in her manifesto.
Too late, Arlene: May’s plans for the elderly were like francium, the naturally occurring element with the shortest known half-life in the universe. So much for strong and stable.
Still, that’s Arlene Foster’s default position. Grasp any reactionary, right-wing position current because she believes that ingratiates herself with the British establishment. It’s the road to nowhere.
Secondly, in typical Foster fashion, she contradicted herself in her own speech.
She asserted, with no evidence whatsoever, that parties in The North were close to an agreed position on Brexit before Sinn Féin collapsed the talks. Really?
She then went on to rubbish Sinn Féin’s key Brexit policy, special status for The North, calling it “ill-defined and ill-conceived and likely to be counter-productive”, whatever that means. How that indicates a potential agreed position is a mystery to everyone but Foster.
All of that: her tired old nostrums, her attitudes, her inability to analyze, her generalizations, are all about fighting the battles of the past. No, not the legacy of the Troubles, but B.C. – Before Christmas – 2016.
Poor Arlene Foster hasn’t yet copped onto the fact that in January this year Sinn Féin made public in the Felons Club in Andersonstown – where else? – a major strategic decision on the institutional arrangements in The North.
Before Christmas, they had decided, quite correctly, that the institutions weren’t delivering because the DUP weren’t playing the game.
Foster, ably assisted by Paul Givan, the political buffoon she appointed, had demonstrated that truth to the extent that Sinn Féin had only to refer to their antics to prove their point or, as they say in the Felons Club, res ipsa loquitur.
Demonizing the IRA which stood down a decade ago and rubbishing Sinn Féin policies may go down well with the Bruges Group, get her a mention on page 19 of the Daily Mail and maybe energize some DUP knuckle-draggers but it won’t advance the politics of Unionists or The North.
It hasn’t dawned on Foster that the terms of trade have changed and that her disastrous, lazy, knee-jerk decision to support Brexit has made a major contribution to that change.
Almost single-handedly, Foster has thrust the constitutional issue to the forefront in The North, an issue which had slid into the background over the past 20 years.
Sinn Féin had got no traction for its demand for a Border poll until Brexit, Nationalist reaction to it and Foster’s thoughtless arrogance produced hubris in the Assembly elections in March.
The backward, lazy approach of simply repeating ‘Sinn Féin’, ‘Sinn Féin’ and ‘down with the IRA’ will get her nowhere in this new world.
The Republican Movement is the organization which has changed most and most successfully, while under Foster’s leadership the DUP has gone backward if you can imagine such a possibility.
Sinn Féin has the initiative. They grabbed it in January.
Regardless of whoever Fine Gael elects as a leader on June 2, he will call an election later this year, certainly if the current favorite Leo Varadkar is the winner.
Or Fianna Fáil will precipitate the election before the new leader has time to settle in. Sinn Féin will emerge the third largest party.
Does Foster realize for a second that she is involved in all-Ireland politics? Of course not. The very thought of it would, as John Major said in another context in 1993, turn her stomach.
However, how will she react to the growing importance of Sinn Féin? Has it ever occurred to her to speak to a Southern party?
Are you kidding? Instead, she mouths the platitudes of the past to her own voters, oblivious to the sea change around her. She’s not at the races.
Try the new Yahoo Mail
