Say what you like about social media but the old fashioned papers are hard to beat to bring you the feel of the last minute election atmosphere. They’re all the more frantic for the polls being all over the place and late tragic dominance of “ keeping us safe.” Later still, the Guardian’s monster montage of the right wing tabloids Later, after Mail on Line posted their attack on Corbyn etc True to form the Daily Mail devotes …
Theresa May is under pressure even in her supposed area of expertise. The attacks on her for “police cuts” are election chaff. Her real defence that cuts that seemed sensible in 2010 are less so in the light of recent events doesn’t work in the climax of an election campaign, and Jeremy Corbyn’s call on her to resign is almost laughably hypocritical. Even so she has only herself to blame for misfiring in her reaction to London bridge outside No 10 …
In their manifesto, the SDLP have now joined Sinn Fein in calling for a unity referendum, albeit on slightly different terms. Both are linking it to Brexit. If the combined nationalist share of the vote next week reaches 40+% which is highly manageable, can a unity referendum or border poll, reasonably be denied? If not, what is reasonable? By one reckoning a 50% threshold would seem unreasonably high for our divided community. By another, a referendum should wait until nationalists have …
Brian WalkerFormer BBC journalist and manager in Belfast, Manchester and London, Editor Spolight; Political Editor BBC NI; Current Affairs Commissioning editor BBC Radio 4; Editor Political and Parliamentary Programmes, BBC Westminster; former London Editor Belfast Telegraph. Hon Senior Research Fellow, The Constitution Unit, Univ Coll. London
Mick has just credited Arlene Foster and the DUP with making moves toward nationalists which Sinn Fein is struggling to answer. I see very little that the DUP have done yet that needs an answer. It is not news that the DUP don’t want a hard border or that there is a case for some sort of Irish Language Act, totemic as it is, particularly when your own contemptuous rejection whipped up demand for it. How to answer SF effectively …
Three academics, John Garry and John Coakley of Queen’s and Brendan O’Leary of the University of Pennsylvania are planning citizens’ assemblies to feed into the Brexit debate in the absence of the elected Assembly. Good idea. We await an announcement which I hope will not be confined to academe, which is where I picked it up – you know, the liberal elite and all that. Their pitch is: How NI voted in the EU referendum – and what it means for …
Here’s a strange thing. There we were, led to believe that Theresa May had dismissed almost with contempt Nicola Sturgeon’s carefully considered case for the UK, or at least Scotland, to remain within the single market. It turns out it wasn’t like that at all. We know that because the Scottish Government itself has just published a reply to the SNP’s paper Scotland’s Place in Europe, from the Brexit Secretary David Davis in a letter dated 29 March. It lists …
One sign of changed times is leading commentators such as Alex Kane Tom Kelly and Newton Emerson ranging across newspapers that not so long ago would have stuck to simple uncomplicated messages for well understood and stable readerships. Times have indeed changed for us all. From my remote position in London however, Alex and Tom are making very heavy weather of the issue of electoral pacts on both sides of the divide. They’re doing so for the best of reasons, …
