Newton Emerson: Stormont powers and further rows

Stormont officials have admitted the deadline to devolve corporation tax “may slip”.

Transfer of the power from London was due in 12 months, after more than a decade of lobbying and planning. But Brexit has raised new questions and the collapse of the Executive means no answers, stretching delay towards inevitable second thoughts.

So ends the only serious attempt in Northern Ireland’s history to reduce the size of its public sector.

Not too serious an attempt, however. Under the 2015 Fresh Start agreement, cutting corporation tax was to be funded by eliminating 10 per cent of public sector jobs, in order to “rebalance the economy”. Natural wastage alone could have achieved this on schedule but instead Stormont borrowed £700 million for voluntary redundancy packages, mainly snapped up by civil servants about to retire regardless.

The Troubles did not find Martin McGuinness. He found them

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At least a rebalancing was tried. On every other issue of contention in the latest Stormont deadlock, both sides agree more government is better. Any impression to the contrary is an illusion.

Irish language

Unionists might be complaining about the cost of an Irish language Act, proposals for which envisage a bilingual public sector. But the DUP has offered to compromise if it can spend the same on Ulster-Scots.

On a bill of rights for Northern Ireland, all debate so far has ignored the idea of freedom from the state and focused on entitlements to be provided by the state – “to the maximum of available resources”, as human rights jargon puts it.

On resurrecting the Civic Forum – now also demanded by Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin – there was nothing that second chamber for the third sector did not see as requiring more spending, programmes, institutions and offices.

On dealing with the past, opening filing cabinets is free. Yet reading their contents will require three new bodies and cost £500 million.

The historian ATQ Stewart wrote that all argument in Northern Ireland boils down to “political power and who should wield it”.

If there were fewer powers and fewer people wielding them, would there be less arguing?

The question deserves to be asked, after so much expensive peace processing under an interventionist consensus.

A further question arises over the cost of Irish unity. This week a poll showed 50 per cent support in the Republic if the cost was €9 billion a year – a fair reflection of Northern Ireland’s 30 per cent deficit.

What if the deficit was only 5 per cent, as it was until the Troubles?

Shrinking the size of the state is the hardest challenge in politics and totemic of the left/right divide. But there is no need for libertarian fantasies or even centre-right hopes to enact a philosophy of less is more in Northern Ireland. We have our own pragmatic pioneer in the shape of Basil Brooke, prime minister of the old Stormont government from 1943 to 1963.

Brooke, later Viscount Brookeborough, treated his post as a part-time job. He typically spent one morning a week in Stormont, in a conscious effort to give Northern Ireland as little “Northern Ireland politics” as possible. Brooke’s approach represented a complete break from his predecessors, both of whom he had served as a full-time minister.

Sectarian firebrand

Stepping back from the fray was all the more remarkable because Brooke had been a sectarian firebrand, notoriously declaring while minister for agriculture that Protestants should never employ Catholics.

The jury is out on whether Brooke’s inaction delivered. His government was not neglectful – it introduced the NHS and important housing reform, although the latter was eventually sabotaged by council corruption.

The world outpaced his gentleman farmer mindset and he was finally eased out of office for not tackling deindustrialisation, although 20 years in power is too long for any leader. The Northern Ireland Labour Party had its greatest success during Brooke’s final years – the only promise of different politics the North has really ever known.

When it comes to traditional “Northern Ireland politics”, a policy of less is more needs to be active rather than passive – as Brooke proved by not being active enough.

The classic sign of stability during his tenure is that the IRA Border campaign was shrugged off by nationalists. But factions within Brooke’s UUP still used it to stir up unionist paranoia, leading directly to Paisleyism, the UVF and the Troubles.

Nobody saw this coming at the time. The clearest lesson to be drawn from Brooke’s approach is that his contemporaries were aware of it and believed it had led to a mellowing of society – the kind of belief that can create its own reality.

The punchline of a much-told joke about Brooke was that his Stormont office did not even have a desk.

All this seems impossibly alien to today’s political culture, and perhaps too unionist as well.

For nationalists and republicans, the way to have less Northern Ireland politics is have no Northern Ireland.

A neat theory – but in practice it might be easier the other way around.