“No Change” is not an option…

Brexit, changing demographics, the rise of Sinn Fein, and even Coronavirus have all given significant impetus into the argument for a United Ireland. However, the majority of people who live in Northern Ireland want to maintain the status quo, and even on current trends that is unlikely to change anytime soon.

But what does “no change” actually mean? The border debate tends to focus on what a United Ireland would look like, which obscures the debate of where we are now. Unfortunately, the evidence shows that maintaining the status quo is a sub-optimal choice that embeds negative outcomes for everyone. Negative outcomes if you are British, negative outcomes if you are Irish, negative outcomes for all of us who live here. Maintaining the status quo is the loose-loose option.

This argument may not reflect everyday experience. We all live in a beautiful country with strong families and communities and, for the most part, a good quality of life. But the land we inhabit and the qualities we share as a people are not the same an effective and well-run State. In terms of governance Northern Ireland is badly mis-managed and structurally dysfunctional.

For 22 years the political leadership of Northern Ireland has limped on from crisis to crisis. With five different parties in government, and an Executive led by two diametrically opposed rivals, this is not surprising. The list of disasters is a long one – abolition of the eleven plus with no agreed system put in its place; a planning framework implemented by one Minister but successfully challenged in the Courts by another; prolonged disputes over justice, culture/identity, and welfare reform; and numerous suspensions, including 5 years in 2002 and three years in 2017. This is a political system that has never worked. And, due to its inherent flaws, it is a system that cannot work.

But is it legitimate to complain – peace is better than war, right? This is essentially a false dichotomy. Almost anything is better than violence, but we set ourselves a very low bar if we cannot demand a government that functions to a minimum standard of competence.

Unfortunately, our politics will never be able to tackle the deep-rooted structural problems that strangle our state. Take the health service. The 2016 Bengou Report highlighted the inability of modern health systems to duplicate specialisation and the serious deterioration that would follow without urgent change. Bluntly this means we need to close hospitals and consolidate resource, something the previous Donaldson report explicitly referenced. There is no question that this is a difficult and complex decision. Unfortunately, it is a decision Northern Ireland is not capable of making. The big calls were ducked and we now spend more than 50% of the NI budget funding a deeply flawed system on the brink of collapse. In 2019 less than 1,500 people in England were waiting more than a year for treatment. In Northern Ireland, with a fraction of the population, the figure was 120,000 – an outcome 3000 times worse.

And if the big challenge has been ducked in health the same can be said of education. Yes, our grammar schools do well with over 90% of pupils securing 5 GCSE’s at grades A-C. Unfortunately, this masks a sharp divide. For boys in controlled schools the figure is 26%, the worst results in the UK. There are parts of the Province where educational under-achievement is engrained for generation after generation. Is this really good enough for our society? And the traditional approach of throwing money at a problem does not work. These are issues that require structural reform, intelligent design, and difficult trade-offs that will produce better outcomes across a broader base. Contrast this with the current reality, where key services like education are wastefully duplicated because of a divided society that has never been healed.

And the list goes on. We don’t have water rates because this would be too unpopular. As a result we have infrastructure that has been starved of capital and is on the point of structural collapse. Inequalities that were in clear breach of human rights obligations, let alone fairness or compassion, were ended by Westminster, not Stormont. We have 26,000 UK and NICS civil servants managing the affairs of 1.8m people – 14.4 per 1,000. In Scotland the figure is just 8. Sadly these inflated figures don’t even bring a higher degree of capacity or expertise, as the RHI report clearly shows.

And if these outcomes are bad for our people they are bad for our neighbours too. Westminister provides an annual subsidy of £9 billion, which is higher than the net budget for the EU. And it’s not just financial as a divided Northern Ireland has often harmed UK strategic relationships, including Dublin and Washington. Whilst in the Republic the status quo in Northern Ireland, particularly post-Brexit, is a continuing source of political and economic instability.

So, if our divided society can agree on just one thing, let us agree that preserving the status quo is not a viable option for anyone. We can’t duck debate for any longer. Something has to change.