Politicians have to lie, be hypocritical and change their minds. If they didn't ever, there'd be no such thing as a political party. Nor could they rise to meet the changing aspirations of any democratic society. Chris admits four general circumstances in which it might be okay for a politician to lie:
To preserve stability
To fob off silly speculation
To promote decent policies in the face of an ignorant or prejudiced electorate
Let's get one thing straight, polls do not increase or decrease the size of a political party. They are snapshots of opinion, not predictors of the future. So whilst Sinn Fein was never the second largest party in the state, neither is Fianna Fail currently the largest.
Of course both, if trends continue, are set to make gains in the next big elections, which are the Locals and Europeans. But all we can say at the moment is that the current situation is volatile, and the government parties are suffering.
(This should have appeared early on Friday morning - until the gremlins got in the way.)
Last week, before the release of the BBC NI Spotlight poll, I talked to a local MLA about the concept of a new Ireland. Over the last few months there has been an increasing level of chatter analysing the mechanics of calling a border poll and interpreting census results.
Curiosity got the better of me and I decided to delve under the instinctive longing and loathing that is so often associated with the notion of a united Ireland to explore what the new state might look like if the conditions could ever be met to have a poll.
Much – though not all – of the commentary comes back to promoting a nationalist ideal of an El Dorado paradise or declaring the unionist nightmare of forcibly cutting ties to the British monarch.
Intellectually it’s a lot more interesting to get beyond the emotion and wonder … What if? What might be the shape of this potential state? How might the population in the north east corner relate to those in the south west? What governance arrangements might be put in place, or indeed left in place? What parts of Northern Ireland’s public sector and civil society would survive, or even thrive? How would the six counties integrate with the twenty six?
And while a poll may be a distant prospect, grasping the Presbyterian principle of ‘not refusing light from any quarter’ I wondered whether a Northern Ireland that is still settled in the Union had anything to learn from new Ireland thinking.
I’d heard Conall McDevitt, SDLP MLA for South Belfast, talking about the importance of region at an election event a couple of years ago, so I met up with him last week to pick his brains. We talked about identity, economy and his opinion of Sinn Féin’s “flag-waving” activity around the border poll. But first I asked about his vision of a united Ireland.
I think one of the great issues with the debate around the a border poll and in fact one of the great issues within both Irish unionism and Irish nationalism is that we have an awful habit of wanting to either remain in the union or to be in a united Ireland. But if we’re honest with ourselves we haven’t done a huge amount of work in trying to work through what that would look like (if you’re thinking about a united Ireland) or to consider the practical issues around it. How would you pay for it? What system of government might be best? Would it be a unitary state? Or would you have a federal Ireland?
We've had a bit of a problem with the wordpress website. We're in the process of sorting that out, though that may take a while. In the meantime, this is a stopgap blog for the time being.
We'll try to get things back to normal as soon as possible, but it may take a while.
The site is ready and looking good, but we have hit what may be some historic difficulties with the database, which are going to take a while to sort out... In the meantime, we'll be blogging out of here any essential stories...
Irishelection.com is asking all the right questions of this crisis... As Cian notes (and it is worth following a few of their internal backlinks just to see the depth and quality of some of the debate over there during the last few days and weeks)...
Yes, JOD needs to go, yes he is sacrificial and yes he is an egregious example of wasteful expense. Yet the whole system is screwed up. Take a look at thestory.ie - they have documents as long as your arm detailing lavish outlays on behalf of our office holders. A good play by the Greens over and above Ciaran Cuffe’s concerns raised on Morning Ireland would be to pitch for the CC role as part of the Programme for Govt and get guarantees of freedom to reform the expense system. Might be good for all sides.
To be fair though, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Parliamentarians and other democratically elected officials have grown up with the assumption of what happens inside those institutions is matter of privilege and secrecy... The way governments treat Oppositions and even junior partners in government demonstrates that many of them still 'just don't get it'...
The genus of this story was Ken Foxe's work for the Sunday Tribune with a series of FOI requests on John O'Donoghue's expenses when he was the Arts and Sports Minister... What helped give it legs through the summer recess however was the public sharing of that information (including sight of the original receipts Foxe got) by Gavin Sheridan and Mark Coughlan at thestory.ie.
In effect the CC was gotcha-ed by an Internet-borne project that both he and his party have severely underestimated at some considerable cost to themselves and their reputations.
No one is going turn that tap off... Now if you want to see what TD or Senator got from what donor or which party gained most from which business sector or profession, you can get it all at from thestory.ie. Hell you can even join in and help join the dots in the vast data dumps and help make all manner of correlations in the data that were only fleetingly thought about before...
The era of Open Government is upon us whether we like it or not. The Houses of the Oireachtas or Stormont, Holyrood or Wesminster for that matter are no longer scenic icons. They are living breathing institutions whose almost every move now has a life on the internet too its denizens still seem think is some kind of petty add on the real business they do on behalf of the nation.
In truth all democracies are in danger of being outrun by the exponential pace of technology and although fall of the walls can be exhilarating to watch, something is being lost in the process...
As I noted in yesterday's Slugger Awards post, 'consultation' is likely to become more important, and not just as a last minute means of resolving log jams in the decision making process, but as a way of making government smarter and more responsive to fast changing societal demands.
As this presentation from a couple of years back highlights, we are living in 'exponential times', and government cannot afford to get left behind:
As it does get left behind, then it's own authority and legitimacy will suffer. Pinning hopes on the Greens reform programme (you can get some indication of the wider Green agenda from this earlier submission) is not likely to be enough.
But this is as much about the culture of politics, as its law or practice. The Irish way has always been to get the hand-shakers and the backslappers in at the expense of people who might have a clue about how to run the country. And there has been an extraordinary level of 'control freakery' around the business of policy formulation and public debate thereof...
And yet in the recent crisis, the first instinct is to reach out and pull in expertise almost from whomever or wherever it can be found (empty suits syndrome)... That's one of the penalties of 'closed government'... But the real penality in the longer term is the way information loops and informalising and speeding up... Citizen journalism projects like thestory.ie have the capacity to wage asymmetric warfare on comparatively 'stupid' institutions.
As Churchill once said, democracy is the worst of all systems, except for all the rest. The bottom line here is that politicians need to think now about how they communicate authoritatively an outside world that will only exponentially smarter than it is today... As Olivia O'Leary noted in her podcast yesterday: "We should know from Northern Ireland what happens when the citizens withdraw their consent to be governed"...
Those who don't may find themselves without that arse in their political pants they once almost took for granted... And the 'smart mob' does not always equate with a wise crowd...
Okay, kicking off I'm afraid with another Gordon Brown blog, this time from Angus in the western Isle's whose response to the Labour leaders call to arms is to post up Monty Python's Black Knight video...
- Unnoticed in all the self promoted hype around the Sun's defection from Brown is another, politically more significant defection: that of Sue Nye, one of Brown's 'inner court' who has made it clear she does not want to be around next May when the action starts...
- (Via Guido) Another YouTube this time Boris Johnson getting some free publicity on East Enders (yeah, right Boris is going to stop in to the East End for one pint and one pint only)....
- Iain Dale's getting up a head of steam in his campaign against the decidedly illiberal Mail for calling him 'overtly gay' in the run up to a Conservative Open Primary in Bracknell (though I suspect it was the accusation that Iain was using his blog to 'pack' the assembly that may have stung the more)...
- Future Taoiseach over on Irish Election picks up an allegation that the German Ambassador has be 'pressurising' the Czech Constitutional Court Chairman Pavel Rychetsky to make an early decision on the constitutionality of the Czech parliament's ratification of the Lisbon Treaty.
- Those of you who followed the Lisbon Essays will understand that a Eurosceptic line of thought is not intrinsically left or right... Sholto Byrnes puts it into a mainstream British context...
- I'm hoping to make it to the Personal Democracy Forum in Barcelona, to talk about some of the work we've been doing on Slugger recently, not least the Lisbon Essays... Over on the website they carry news of the new online Tory vote winning machine: MyConservatives.com... It's modelled on the My.BarackObama.com, and focuses almost entirely on front facing campaign work... (expect something similar to emerge from Fianna Fail after their engage engagement with Blue State Digital?)
- The Samosa's a brand new British Asian blog and comment site... The start balance is left of centre, and the aim to create an inclusive public conversation which will draw on writers from across Britain, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan...
- In a break from Irish Election's coverage of Lisbon, P O'Neill remembers that glorious moment after the Rome EU summit of 1990 which lead to the inglorious fall of a British PM in Paris, just weeks later...
“Americans? The worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which advertisers know how to provoke."
Whilst Slugger is down (I know, I know... we're moving serves in the next few days)... The Judge makes it clear there are protections for journalists, but these are qualified protections...
Although the Recorder concludes
[33] I have therefore at this point reached conclusions as follows:
(a) That the concept of confidentiality for journalists protecting their sources is recognised in law, and specifically under the 2000 Act and Article 10 of the Convention;
He also notes that:
[21] The legislature clearly addressed the question of journalistic material in relation to Article 10 in various ways, but for the purposes of this application I have addressed it by the inclusion in the 2000 Act of a special procedure whereby such material can only be produced on an application to the court. However, and this mirrors the position under the Convention, such a right is not an absolute right. It is a qualified right following the wording of Article 10(2) namely that the freedom is “subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society”. The paragraph in short introduces the balance between the public interest specifically referred to of the prevention of disorder or crime, with the interest of the freedom of expression including the preventing of the disclosure of information received in confidence.
[22] While the court clearly must both respect, as it does, the personal view of any journalist who appears before it in relation to information in his or her possession, and the obligation imposed on themselves by themselves reflecting any professional obligation such as contained in the Code of Practice, nevertheless the court has its obligations to carry out the balancing exercise which on occasion may well demand that the duty which the journalist believes he or she is under must give way to a public interest such as the detection and successful prosecution of a member of such a ruthless organisation prepared to carry out this and other attacks.
