Long past time for NI to think bigger than its historic grudge matches

Just listened to Erland Cooper’s “Sounds of Change” on BBC Radio 6 Music. For me, the opening is pretty emotional. As someone who grew up with the sea literally 50 yards from the shore of the Belfast Lough in Holywood, I suddenly realised how much miss it.

Then there’s the extraordinary words of Florence Nightengale, repeated by Paul Weller, a reminder of that the many nurses in my family have been both the pride and inspiration of my life. But it also captures a moment of freshness we need to not forget.

Whilst the space for regrowing the rancour and discord of the pre-Covid 19 days will undoubtedly return, unlike the crash of 2008 we have time to contemplate and change our suboptimal courses for better ones. We have had to come together on this thing.

That unity may seem frail, but proof that it’s genuine is seen in the actions taken and the general cover from others in the Executive that’s been given to the Health Minister despite the overall sluggish response (north and south).

Sure, SF wants to have its cake and eat it, by blaming powersharing for its inability to provide nice things (like a world-class testing regime) but like the wily political hedge fund it is, the party is always alert to the opportunity to make capital out of disaster.

Yet, after a shaky start, it has, by and large, played onside. That’s where people want them. Yesterday I was sent this from a book on the UK’s transition from 1930s austerity to a wartime economy (in which Labour minister’s played a critical role):

There is an opportunity (at macro and micro level) to paddle through to a different era and very different fixes to ones that have seen massive transfers from Labour (or, wage slaves) to capital (money/wealth) over the last 40 years. Here’s a 101 from Mark Blyth:

As we return to a post-normal world, that won’t be so easy. The loss in growth is as much a momentum problem as anything structural and it will come with a big question of how do we deal with this one (12 years after the last one).

As my friend David Steven of the Long Crisis group notes:

This pandemic is the latest in a series of shocks. It was rooted in loss of biodiversity, shifts in farming practices, increased urbanisation, and other stresses associated with economic and social change.

Its impacts are already being magnified by disruptive actors — both state and non-state. And the response has been hampered by astonishingly poor leadership in many countries, above all, the President of the United States.

As a result, we find ourselves in an especially perilous stretch of the river. The tempo is now controlled by the virus. Even best-case outcomes will be messy.

And those who are willing to row together must resist both the spoilers who actively pursue a path of destruction and the tendency to retreat into polarisation at a time when so much depends on our ability to work collectively.

“A series of shocks”. That implies that fixing this one is no stand-alone job. There will be other shocks that perhaps pile in on top of this one before it has finished unwinding. That may sound like someone else’s problem.

What can a devolved institution do in the face of the insouciance of Whitehall in general and the Treasury in particular? Well, it’s what we have relied upon in this crisis. And by and large, it has done okay, even compared to the south.

What we have discovered is that resilience is locally managed to such an extent that none of us who live more than 10 miles from the border would likely have noticed had it been closed. As it happens, there has been no need for that.

Gabriel Scally was right to highlight how the UK government’s closing down of regional government offices has, by contrast with Northern Ireland, made England a geographically sprawling and hard to manage public health space.

We aren’t accustomed to thinking big in Northern Ireland, but it is long past time we started thinking bigger than our historic grudge matches. NI politicians may not feel that they have had to take a view on the macroeconomic situation and try to shape it.

Under Covid (and the dearth of news we can genuinely add value to) Slugger is starting to re-structure its purposes and how we go about things. We have new writers, many of them women, quietly exploring our newfound “sense of community” as Priestly put it.

It’s cleared space for Brian O’Neill’s new vlogcast/podcast with two leading thinkers on roads and infrastructure, who are asking our planners to look anew at plans that were cast in the 1990s in the context of the affordances and human needs of the early 21C.

And there’s Steve Bradley’s critical look at the new City Deal for Derry which if handled carefully, particularly where it edges into competition with the Belfast centred new deal area, and finally starts to bring the levels of opportunity and prosperity it will need.

There are people of talent who would move home from crowded metropolises across the western hemisphere at the drop of a hat if they thought we were beginning to embrace the future rather than just continuing to grumbling endlessly about past inequities.

How we handle that fragile future through and after these moments of clarity and great change matters hugely not only to our place in the world but that of our kids and grandkids. “Not going back to the way things were” is one of the best slogans I’ve seen.

That needs to be turned into a broader (dare I say it, Swedish style) consensus that we can all buy into and finally move forward.

“Crawfordsburn” by Dumphasizer is licensed under CC BY-SA