So Cameron has said, no. Nick Clegg has said no. And David Ed Miliband has said no. In the meantime, Sinn Fein stayed well clear of last Thursday’s The View when Simon Hamilton dished the dirt on their avoidance of the question of a governmental budget which is crumbling:
And after three days of ‘thinking’, John O’Dowd (the guy who always gets to clear up the party’s mess) struggled to explain his party’s refusal to discuss the matter at the Executive table.
So what’s the exit strategy? After cashiering the wise counsel of Leo Green, there isn’t one.
For Sinn Fein the important thing it seems is to be seen to protest, even as you make things worse. As the DUP’s Lee Reynolds has noted on Slugger, you cannot protect people on benefits by magnifying the harm of original offence.
And it should be noted that what passes for the party’s policy track is driving lemming like* towards an even larger fiscal cliff. As Reynolds notes:
The savings of utilising national computer systems will go. We will have to spend hundreds of millions of pounds to create our own computer systems. This will have to be taken from our capital budget, which is a key driver in our local construction industry and the IT contracts could end up with a non-NI contractor.
*apologies to all members of the Lemming genus, we do know you are not that stupid…
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
