Community Relations and British identity

I am speaking later today at an event in Toome on community relations, particularly with reference to my British identity.

There are so many aspects I wish to cover!

They include:

What is a British identity? To my mind, “British” must inevitably be “hyphened” – one has to be “British and…” not just “British”. Yet many people in Northern Ireland seem not to view it this way.

Differing Britishnesses. Britishness can mean vehemently competing things in NI. To me, it is a reference to the modern UK – multicultural, tolerant, and so on. Yet for many in Northern Ireland it seems to indicate a very specific form of Christianity and an innate conservatism.

Potential decline. Is Britishness on the decline? Only 29% of people England and Wales ticked “British” at all in the census. More than twice as many ticked “English”. What is more, that figure was highest in areas of high ethnic population – put bluntly, a hugely disproportionate number of the people in England who regard themselves as “British” are not white.

Protestant linkage. There is an argument that because only 40% in Northern Ireland ticked “British only” yet 48% were of “Protestant background”, there is a breakdown in correlation between the two. I see no such breakdown. On the contrary, 48% ticked “British” overall, almost the same share deemed “Protestant background”. In each local council area, the gap is rarely more than two percentage points. There are exceptions to everything, but in fact there is a clear correlation between “British” and “Protestant” in Northern Ireland.

UK versus British. Although I describe myself of “British identity”, I personally also describe myself as a “UK national”, the government in Whitehall as the “UK Government”, my travel document as a “UK passport” and my home state as “the UK” – in other words, I make an innate differentiation between “UK” and “British”. Do others, I wonder?

All worth pondering!

NIO must not fall for another community relations “groundhog day”

The Northern Ireland Office (NIO; implicitly, the UK Government) threatened the NI Executive with maintaining 2015 as Assembly Election year and the failure of a potential economic package if it didn’t get serious about a “Shared Future”.

The NIO needs to be quite clear – it still isn’t.

Despite this, the NIO has already yielded on the election date. Perhaps this is understandable – the same has happened in Scotland and Wales.

However, for any economic package to have a serious impact where it most needs to have one, a “Shared Future” needs to be central to it, not to come after it as the Finance Minister has advocated.

The NIO, civic society, the Alliance Party and everyone else needs to understand something clearly and indisputable: the DUP and Sinn Fein are not serious about a “Shared Future” and never will be.

I have said it countless times: a “Shared Future” doesn’t suit political parties who have built their entire power base on a “divided past”. Even if they believed in attaining one, they would have no motivation whatsoever to do so. That is why we have the “groundhog day” of yet another re-named document with no concrete “SMART” actions and no questions answered about where the funding is actually coming from.

If people want a “Shared Future”, they’re going to have to vote for one. By and large, so far, they haven’t.

Community Relations and asserting identity

It is community relations week, so I want to run three posts on the subject.

Divided We Stand? Mapping patterns of shared and separated space is the title of a newly published piece of research by Orna Young and Stephen Roulston. It is of course worth a read in its own entirety, but I thought in particular this table was worth looking at, from a selection of over 400 young people of school-going age in Northern Ireland:

There is a lot to think on there, however what struck me most was the penultimate line. Asserting community identity can undermine social cohesion.

That is hugely challenging. One of the biggest causes of conflict and terrorism world-wide is a sense of lost identity. If people cannot assert their community identity without “undermining social cohesion”, we are in serious difficulties.

It is certainly not a question to which I have an answer. Has anyone?

Champions’ League Final a “Clásico” of sorts

Spain’s “Clásico” is the ultimate clash not just because it contains two of the game’s most famous and successful clubs, but because it provides a clash between Spanish imperialism and the Right on one hand, and Catalan regionalism and the Left on the other. Politics, culture and sport all intertwine at the very highest level of football.

Other countries’ equivalents do not match it because they lack this mix – Milan-Juve, Liverpool-United and Benfica-Porto all combine their countries’ two most illustrious teams in terms of national and European titles, but do not provide the same mix of politics and culture. 

This brings us to the peculiar case of Germany, where the “Klassiker” involves Bayern and a team from the west or north which rotates every so often. In the ’70s, Borussia Mönchengladbach was the rival (and even this season was one of only four teams to take points off Bayern in the Bundesliga); then the northern rivals of Hamburg and Werder Bremen took turns at it; before the rivalry shifted west again, this time to Borussia Dortmund.

This is a serious rivalry – Bayern Munich contains the name of the State in which Munich is contained in its name (“Bayern” is German for “Bavaria”); Borussia Dortmund contains the Latin name for “Prussia”, which covered most of the north and west of the country (and Dortmund, despite lying inland, was also associated with the medieval Hanseatic trading league alongside Hamburg and Bremen). Instantly, therefore, this is a historic culture clash.

Germany has also changed dramatically regionally in recent years, even leaving aside the “new States” (the former East). In the ’70s, Mönchengladbach represented the prosperous industrial west against the poorer, agrarian Bavarians. That has changed remarkably, with the prosperity gap between North and South now in fact greater than the gap between West and East – in favour of the South. Bavaria – home of Siemens, BMW and Audi among many others – scarcely experienced the German recession of the early 2000s and has emerged among the most prosperous places in Europe; meanwhile the Ruhrgebiet, an urban conglomeration the size of Greater London in which Dortmund is located, has suffered post-industrial decline. Such is the scale of the regional clash, it is quite possible that supporters of Dortmund’s local rival, Gelsenkirchen-based Schalke, will in fact back Dortmund.

On top of all that, there is of course the dialect clash. Bavaria’s First Minister Edmund Stoiber was candidate for German Chancellor a decade ago, but his phraseology, particularly when out on the stomp, left Germans elsewhere bewildered to the extent that some wonder if it cost him the election. Bavarian is closer in fact to Austrian German than anything you would hear in the Ruhr, Hamburg or Berlin, spoken more at the front of the mouth with its most famed footballing example being Franz Beckenbauer. “Ruhrpott” German, on the other hand, can at its most extreme be closer to Dutch than Bavarian.

On top of all of that is the straightforward point that the Ruhr and Bavaria tend to produce most of the German national team. This on-field clash, almost an “internal derby” of sorts, is best illustrated of course by the case of Mario Götze, born in Bavaria but bred in Dortmund, who will play his final game for Dortmund against Bayern, the very team he is joining in the summer.

So, yes, this is not quite the “Clásico”, but it has significant elements of it. One final similarity is that these teams know each other well – this season they have drawn 1-1 twice in the League (Dortmund was the only team Bayern failed to beat in the Bundesliga), and Bayern edged a home cup tie 1-0. With a degree of bitterness surrounding Bayern’s method of approaching Dortmund players and on-field familiarity, the likelihood is this will be a game of few goals – with Bayern the narrow victor.

Let’s Talk about Dementia

It’s Dementia Week and I am appearing on BBC Radio Ulster‘s Talkback programme this lunchtime to discuss my father’s dementia. I think it highly important that we do so, and my main aim (although it’ll be just a five-minute edit in the end) is to help others prepare. This is something with which many of us are already familiar, and that is bound, in the next generation, to become most of us.

1. Prepare for dementia right from the off – if you are lucky enough to live to a reasonable age, there is a fair chance you will get it. Most importantly, sign an Enduring Power of Attorney (in Northern Ireland; now known as a Lasting Power of Attorney in England/Wales). This has the effect of allocating responsibility for your health/welfare (albeit to a more limited degree in Northern Ireland than in England/Wales) and finances/property to someone else in the event that you are deemed unfit to make these decisions for yourself (collectively in Northern Ireland; there is now a separate document for each in England/Wales). Do this as soon as your children reach adulthood.

2. If you are fairly sure a loved one has early dementia, talk about it – in my case, this was when my father completely lost his sense of direction, but there are of course other indicators. This can be done gently; focus on how perhaps the memory is not what it was, perhaps some decisions are becoming unnecessarily stressful, or whatever. Continue to get physical and mental exercise.

3. If you are fairly sure a loved one is advancing with dementia, get a diagnosis - in my case, this was when my father had run up mobile phone bills, inadvertently on contracts he no doubt did not mean to sign, of ₤2,000. This may require some hard work and you may have to do it yourself (some GPs are unwilling to give the diagnosis and there is no particular clear boundary between dementia and not-dementia) – in my case, I myself had to make an appointment with the GP practically to demand the diagnosis be made, largely because my father (inevitably and understandably) denied as much was wrong as was.

4. When you feel your loved one really isn’t capable of handling their own affairs, you will then need to activate your Power of Attorney, by placing it with the High Court complete with confirmation of diagnosis by the GP. Unfortunately this costs – ₤50 to the GP, ₤120 to the Court plus (probably) legal fees. You will then receive one copy of the Power of Attorney stamped by the Court, plus copies – to use it with any authority (say, a bank) you will need to show the original and leave a copy. Note that the Power applies throughout the UK - a lot of private institutions in other legal jurisdictions of the UK will try to deny this, and so it may be worth having some solicitor’s letters handy to write to any such institution.

5. Be prepared throughout of the emotional journey - it is all well and good managing the administrative side efficiently, but ultimately you are restricting the independence of a loved one and that entails, frankly, a grieving process of sorts. Do not be ashamed of this – in fact, there would be something wrong with you if you were not, at various stages, upset by what you are having to do. And do speak to people – most people have some idea at least of what you are going through.

I sincerely hope this helps.

Abuse allegations demonstrate need for fundamental change on men’s issues

Scarcely a day passes now without yet another celebrity being brought up an abuse claim. It is all profoundly disturbing. Yet it does leave open a fundamental question which no one has yet even posed – what are we going to do about men? (That link is compulsory viewing, by the way!)

For too long domestic violence has been seen as a “women’s issue”. Yet women are rarely the perpetrators! Instantly, by assigning it to the category “women’s issue”, we turn away the very people who, in the vast majority of cases, have the issue – namely men! As a result the whole focus, in instances of domestic violence or rape or similar, becomes the woman, the victim. We begin to ask all sorts of questions about the victim – but rarely about the man, the perpetrator! It is as if we should meekly accept there are men prone to violence against women as a fact of life, and focus on preparing women for that fact. Is this not utterly deranged?

Now that perpetrators turn out to include celebrities and victims turn out to include children, we are beginning to wake up. Yet I suspect we have not yet grasped what is at the heart of the issue – not just the crazed intermeshing of celebrity, power and sex but actually a fundamental flaw in male culture which still sees dominance as something to be strived for.

Domestic violence is no “women’s issue”. It stands alongside celebrity and clerical abuse (and perhaps also human trafficking) as very much a “men’s issue”. What is required is a cultural shift in attitudes, similar to the way we have tackled racism or even drink-driving. For the most deeply disturbing aspect of all these abuse trials is that no one spoke out at the time – and thus we have no guarantee whatsoever that this type of thing isn’t still just as common.

Conservatives still fundamentally misunderstand UKIP challenge

“Once we get our EU Referendum Bill through that’ll sort them out“, Conservatives say to each other, albeit in a consoling rather than determined fashion, after UKIP’s latest successes in England. It is a total nonsense, because UKIP’s vote has nothing to do with Europe.

The problem is one driven primarily by the media which operate only with an outrageously simplistic linear analysis of politics – in their analysis: a) from left to right you have “Labour – LibDem – Conservative – UKIP”; b) UKIP is gaining votes; therefore c) those votes are “centre-right” votes and must be coming from the Conservatives as that is the only possible source. How on earth, then, did UKIP get 24% of the vote in South Shields?!

I have long argued that the “left-right” division in politics no longer meaningfully exists. The choice is really to do with “tribe”, with swing voters (the ones who decide elections) making their decision based on perceived competence.

The situation in England was summed up recently by a poll showing the most common single-word response by people to each of the three main party leaders – to Cameron it was “privileged”, to Clegg “confused”, and to Miliband simply “no”. The sense is that all three essentially believe in the same things, most notably on the economy and immigration, to the extent that these have moved beyond serious debate. A charismatic friend of the working man who drinks ale down the pub and allows people to talk about immigration without being accused of bigotry and racism is what many people are looking for as an alternative to all three - step forward Nigel Farage.

The issue is not that the English have suddenly all become closet racists – they are in fact the most tolerant people in Europe. It is that they are not even being allowed to talk about the issues which affect them. If your factory job has been taken by a foreigner who, unlike you, doesn’t have a family to support and can thus afford to work longer hours at lower wages than you can, that is a very real issue for you – and not even being allowed to raise it, for fear of being branded a racist, is extremely galling. That is the sentiment UKIP is basing its appeal upon.

The very fact people believe the UKIP threat can be seen off with a “Referendum Bill” just goes to show how out-of-touch the Government and the main parties are with the real issues driving the UKIP vote. What working people right across England want – Conservative voters in Essex and Labour voters in Northumbria alike – is a reasonable debate on jobs and immigration. Can any of the “main parties” generate one?

Happy Europe Day tomorrow, by the way…

Irish Cup Final anthem farce shows DUP still doesn’t get it

The DUP (incorporating the Ulster Unionists) continues to stir up trouble where there was none otherwise to be had. The latest example was its weasel words about the lack of an anthem being played – something which is not new, by the way – at this weekend’s Irish Cup Final.

To be clear, this latest attempt at raising tensions followed on from the DUP raising tensions over parades, then over flags, and then over a football match involving one of the teams which was in the Final. It also just happened to coincide with the First Minister coming under pressure over his failure on a Shared Future stategy, the Health Minister coming under pressure over his U-turn on care homes, and the Social Development Minister coming under pressure over the delay in Welfare Reform. Just happened to coincide, mind…

More than this, it is further evidence that the DUP, just like Sinn Fein, is continuing to sell the people it represents a lie. In 1998, most of us signed up to an Agreement whereby the people of Northern Ireland may opt, by nationality, to be British or Irish. In other words, unlike anywhere else under UK sovereignty, its citizens may opt not to be British and still be good citizens loyal to Northern Ireland – in other words the administration has a single sovereignty, but its people have dual nationality. Whatever its representatives like to claim, the DUP signed up to the precise same deal on citizenship, with no modifications whatsoever even attempted, in 2007. Any DUP representative and any of the people he or she represents has to deal with the straightfoward fact that many of their fellow citizens are not British, while still perfectly good citizens of Northern Ireland.

This brings us to the Northern Ireland football team. The role of an international football team is nothing to do with sovereignty (otherwise there would be no separate England/Scotland/Wales teams, or Palestine or Montserrat or whatever), and everything to do with nationality – hence qualification for a team is determined by nationality/citizenship, with understandable caveats to stop players essentially being bought to compete for a certain association (the way athletes are). Long before 1998 it was clear that a player with either British or Irish nationality may play for Northern Ireland, provided that player qualified by birth, ancestry or residence link. The whole point here is that FIFA made a mistake when it allowed people with Irish citizenship to opt to play for the Republic of Ireland on no grounds other than citizenship – in 1998 (and 2007) we signed up to a deal which makes it absolutely clear that Irish citizenship may come by virtue of a link to Northern Ireland just as much as it does by a link to the Republic of Ireland. If someone is from Northern Ireland, they may be British or Irish (there is no guarantee which); likewise, if someone has Irish citizenship they may be from the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland (there is no guarantee which). Whatever the sovereignty of Northern Ireland, it is clear that to tie Irish citizenship directly to the territory of the Republic of Ireland is wrong under the terms of the 1998 Agreement; as is tying British citizenship alone to Northern Ireland.

The long and the short of it is this: affiliation to the football association of a particular territory is about nationality not sovereignty. Thus the IFA may select players of either British or Irish nationality because those are both nationalities of Northern Ireland. And thus, my friends, there is no reason to assign the anthem of only one of those nationalities to the IFA. Most of all, there is no reason to stir up tensions where none exists – and every reason to provide leadership and explain to people the country they are living in and who their fellow citizens (the ones who play for the same international team) really are.

Of course, they don’t actually play “God Save the Queen” before the Scottish Cup Final either – and indeed when Cardiff City reached the FA Cup Final the (English) FA agreed to play the Welsh anthem despite the fact it does not represent Wales. But, as ever, the DUP was obviously too busy being British to notice…

First Minister owes apology on Shared Future failure

The First Minister and his DUP colleagues accused the Alliance Party and John McCallister (then of the UUP) of not being serious about a Shared Future because they walked out of talks between the Assembly parties on the subject.

Now, however, the DUP admits there is still no Shared Future strategy, and has indeed taken to advocating that there should not even be one – with Finance Minister Sammy Wilson arguing it will only be needed once the economy is sorted out.

In other words, the talks the DUP, Sinn Fein and the SDLP remained involved in were an utter sham. The DUP and Sinn Fein never had any intention of delivering a Shared Future strategy. The only thing they wanted to share was the blame for not delivering one – by bringing all the other parties around the table and then refusing to make any progress.

If anything, it took the Alliance Party too long to walk out. Like most advocates of better community relations, the Alliance Party has to realise that communal parties – whose interests are directly served by not having a Shared Future – are no friends. People who will make progress on good relations are not those who are motivated to maintain bad relations in order to keep in place the very division from which they derive their power (except where irrelevant partisan posturing is involved, everything in the Assembly – from same-sex marriage to whether or not to take jackets off on a warm day – gets split along those lines).

It turns out the Alliance Party and John McCallister were entirely right in their analysis that the DUP/Sinn Fein-led talks on a Shared Future were a total sham. Their walk out was fully justified. Those who condemned them for it – from the First Minister downwards – now owe them, and us, an apology; and perhaps an analysis of what precisely is wrong with the Alliance Party’s own proposals, published earlier this year. Of course the Alliance Party, which only entered the Executive in return for a commitment to a Shared Future strategy, will have to decide its own position in due course – it cannot be complicit in a blatant failure to deliver, which has social and economic consequences for us all.

Same-sex marriage would do more for NI economy than any conference

I am reminded of this scene from Father Ted: “Another mass? That’s our best idea?”

It seems the discussion is similar around the NI Executive table. “Another investment conference? That’s our best idea?”

The truth is NI can have as many investment conferences as it likes, it will scarcely create a single job until Northern Ireland develops a truly open economy. And for an open economy, you need an open society.

Think of all the seriously successful and prosperous cities and regions (excluding those which have got there by dint purely of a lucky oil strike or some such), and you will think of truly open, multi-cultural, diverse and socially liberal cities – Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, New York, Vancouver, Sydney and so on. These are cities which embrace change and innovation in business and thus lead the world in it – and inevitably they are cities which embrace social change and social innovation. In some ways, Dublin or Edinburgh could be placed on the above list. Could Belfast?

Belfast, and Northern Ireland as a whole, is a closed economy. Segregated into silos, the primacy of “who you know not what you know” when looking for jobs, tenders or contracts is taken for granted. If you’re looking for international investment where merit and innovation are essential, that is hopeless!

It is a closed economy primarily because it is a closed society. We saw another example this week, with an Assembly vote comfortably opposing same-sex marriage. Tell me, which of the above prosperous cities does not allow or plan to allow same-sex marriage? Not one.

Prosperous cities and regions – the type international investors will choose – are open and embracing of social change and thus trusted with economic innovation and ultimately wealth creation. Closed societies – ones which rely on “who you know” and even just outright corruption – remain backward and poor. This is a universal truth – but for a lucky oil strike or some such, there are no exceptions at all to it.

So frankly Arlene Foster can have all the international investment conferences she likes – until she votes for same-sex marriage and other socially progressive and open policies, she is merely fiddling in the wind.