NI POLITICS: Fudge that
The consequences of David Trimble running out of choices
ERO's editorial comment
This is not Tony Blair being tough
What sort of verdict would the Stormont elections have rendered on the ‘peace process’, if they had been allowed to go ahead as scheduled with all the other British May Day polls? Even to ask the question is to grasp the futility of democracy in devolved Ulster. For whatever the result would have been in terms of votes cast and parties elected, this answer from the people would only have meant whatever the government wanted it to mean. Since the start of devolved power-sharing, the government has required that it should mean that elections don't really matter very much, as taking part’s the thing. By all means come fourth — you’ll still get your share of government office, for there are to be no losers here. ‘There shall be no opposition’, was very much the spirit of the revived Stormont. Since democracy is at least as much about there being losers, and them being content with that, as it is concerned with producing governing winners, the squalid anti-democratic nature of the suspended devolutionary regime is hardly to be regretted in its absence. But David Trimble, as he always has done throughout his entire political career, wants ‘Stormont’ back. This urge has equally always been detrimental to unionism. The significance of what will come to pass in the Autumn is whether Mr Trimble gets his laager back. All good unionists should hope that he does not. Regardless of what does come to pass, Mr Trimble won’t be playing a part in it.
How did Stormont come to vanish from the realm of contested politics? The straightforward explanation would be that, one party to the power-sharing set-up was discovered to be engaged in extra-constitutional practice towards it democratic peers, hence on discovery of the Sinn Fein/IRA spy ring, the devolved institutions (well, most of them) had to be suspended. In the reasonable world of Prof. Bew and Mr Trimble it follows that since the institutions have been suspended, and thus the balance of Stormont’s parliamentary term was moot (could it have truly been expended, given that the assembly wasn’t sitting?), and since any elections now would have been to a body similarly unlikely to sit, which even if it did, would not have been liable to agree to progress with the process, what was the useful point of elections? This therefore was a species of realism which Mr Trimble and his cohort in the UUP successfully impressed upon Downing Street. That the tipping point for Mr Blair was, by all accounts, a threat last Wednesday by Mr Trimble to then and there resign as Unionist leader (or was it merely as ‘first minister designate’?) doubtless says more for the Prime Minister’s lack of imagination, than it does for anything else. As what, after all, would be so terminally frightening about a world, or even a peace process, where David Trimble no longer led the UUP?
That this is still an evidently unimaginable prospect for Whitehall — a Trimble-free process — is of course a reminder that the reason why the Assembly was suspended had next to nothing to do with the ‘discovery’ of a Provo spy-ring late last year. The reason why the state opted to expose this was to provide a pretext for suspending the Assembly, and the Assembly needed to be suspended in order to press a ‘pause button’ on political developments in the Province. There should be little doubt that the ‘spying’ activities of the Provisionals were well known to the authorities since their inception, indeed, it is hardly too fanciful to suggest that the British state knew that the IRA was going to ‘get’ a spy ring in Stormont even before the Provos did themselves.
Why then did this pause button need to be pressed? because David Trimble in October of 2002 for the first time, and as it will ultimately turn out, fatally for the Belfast Agreement process, lost control of the Ulster Unionist Council. There is no prospect, with the Agreement configured as it is, and with his track record in invigilating it, that he will regain that control. In other words, his policy of concession and accommodation, allied to his failure even to preserve all the limited unionist goals attained in the Belfast Agreement, still less advance the position of unionism, had by last October become too much for his party to consent to any longer. The defeat of the Trimbleite position, and the substitution of the policy of Jeffrey Donaldson and others at that meeting was the core reason why the government had to freeze the process. If this hadn’t happened then, the entire structure would have begun to unravel. As it is, this has happened regardless, albeit at a much slower, and so more manageable pace. The extended pause has given the government time to think, but there are few signs as yet that it has come up with any new answers of its own. The lure of the process, though misleading, is still irresistible.
It is laughable to suggest that a war-emboldened Prime Minister has had a rush of moral courage, and that this new-found fortitude accounts for the degree of resistance he has obliged all the other constitutional players to offer up to Sinn Fein/IRA. Mr Blair would have willingly agreed to whatever deal Mr Trimble found himself able to agree to. The proof of that lies in innumerable instances of government policy from the moment onwards of the Prime Minister’s speech in Belfast’s Customs House last year. That, post-discovery and just after suspension, speech was, again, the ‘final’ chance for the Provos to live up to the basic demand of the Agreement (and Mr Blair’s hand-written pledge) that they should finally go out of business if Sinn Fein were to be allowed to continue masquerading in democratic politics as simply a party like any other. This final chance, like all the ones preceding it since 1998, came and went, and was joined by still more final chances between then and now.
That it is, ever so slowly, genuinely turning into being Sinn Fein’s final chance, for now, to stay inside this particular political process in due in part to Sinn Fein’s conduct. Their incompetence and arrogance partially account for why they have failed to finesse a deal that would have been sufficiently attractive for David Trimble to feel unable to decline it. More fundamental has been that their medium term strategy was always flawed if it was seriously thought that this moment could perpetually be avoided. The current leadership of the current Republican movement have neither stomach nor ability to resume terrorism, but the transformation pride and common sense (the abandonment of their terrorist reserve, or at least, their formalised link thereto) has had them seeking to postpone is finally firmly upon them. It’s terrorists or politicians now. Given that there’s no going back for the top two, they at any rate will choose [sic] to become flawed politicians, albeit with an inevitable (and inevitably doomed) attempt to in fact retain their status as terrorist leaders too.
This — the eventual public sundering of the terrorist and political path (despite, as I have said, the initial attempts to ‘cheat’ and maintain it) for the mainstream Republican movement, with a majority following the political route, though terrorist recidivism will be continuous amongst this majority, and that will again lead to either the expulsion of Sinn Fein, or the imposition of another total pause on the process — is entirely predictable. What thus far has not been generally accounted for, in terms of how we have at last reached this moment of Republican transition, is, why now for transformation? The reason, to repeat unto infinity, is that the deal, as still-terrorists-really, that Sinn Fein have been holding out to David Trimble is in truth no worse than what he has eventually always gone along with for the last five years: what has changed is David Trimble’s freedom to accept another bad deal for unionism. This autonomy has been stripped from his leadership, and for the remainder of it, he’s not going to get it back.
A great big decision coming
Irish republicanism, or to be more honest since there is no authentic pan-island political consciousness, Northern Irish republicanism, made its decision a long time ago. This has amounted to a recognition that the ‘armed struggle’ has: failed disastrously (each murder copper-fastened the Union); that its continuance in any meaningful form would have been far beyond what the Provisionals were capable of, the limpness of the formal British response notwithstanding; and, finally, that wider political circumstances (to wit the attitude to Belfast, and terrorism, of London, Dublin, and Washington, DC) have not developed in a fashion conducive to the resumption of political violence on the old model. In consequence, the Republican leadership’s policy has resulted in an attempt to surrender with as much dignity as possible. This desire was sated by both the British government, and, crucially, by David Trimble. Given the security failures of the British state, this decision by Mr Trimble to go along with a policy of embracing a not very regretful nor very-punished, though supposedly non-terrorist, Republican movement, was not very surprising.
In addition, David Trimble thought that he would continue to ‘win’ the peace, through the superior conduct of political engagement by Unionists as against the Republican neophytes; this personal confidence in his own abilities was, at some primordial level, sustained by Mr Trimble’s belief that, with the de facto Provo surrender, ‘historical momentum’ was with him and his. This latter assumption was mistaken in as much as history has no momentum, and what Republicans had done was merely opt to participate more explicitly, if hardly ‘exclusively’, in politics: a forum in which they have often had as their allies against Mr Trimble, some or all of the three governments involved. From the point of view of unionism, the central tragedy has been that Mr Trimble has proven to not be desperately good at proper politicking. However, it has not been his relative inadequacy which has encompassed his effective destruction as a political leader, but the comprehensive inadequacy of Sinn Fein’s political nous.
Very simply, by not realising when they had reached the very last moment when they could still cut a deal with David Trimble that he could accept, Republicans have hollowed out his leadership of the UUP to the point where he has become, effectively, politically bankrupt. As we have considered above, this process is a one-way road for the present leadership of Sinn Fein/IRA, so their political interests, for that’s the world they have been sucked into, would have been best served by cutting and running at this point. Cutting away from terrorism, and running with whatever final compromise David Trimble could have borne should have been the objective. Instead, Sinn Fein have refused to buy and so Mr Trimble defaults. Unable to proceed on the basis of his leadership strategy since he signed the Belfast Agreement, David Trimble remains leader of the Ulster Unionist Party solely courtesy of London’s decision to mothball politics in the Province. He can neither hope to lead it successfully into an election, nor can he seriously expect to receive from Sinn Fein the realistic assistance that would enable him to enable them to rejoin ‘politics’. By not giving David Trimble enough rope to hang himself (in the UUC), Sinn Fein have roped themselves off from politics for the foreseeable future, whilst being unable, because they are profoundly unwilling, to resume serious terrorism.
This stasis will continue until one of two things happens: either David Trimble resigns as UUP leader, or Sinn Fein finally offers him enough of a deal that he can accept, but that the UUC cannot, and thus he loses the leadership of his party that way. In the first instance, given his current dependency, Mr Trimble is likely to resign at the behest of the government. This does not seem a desirable prospect for them now, but if he hasn’t gone of his own accord by the Autumn, they will conclusively come to see the unavoidable merit in it then. David Trimble, thanks to Sinn Fein/IRA’s stupidity, has stopped being useful to the government, and isn’t going to start being so again. In the second instance, seemingly the less likely route at the moment, but in truth much more plausible, David Trimble will, by about September, get and take a package to the UUC. What’s probably going to happen is that he will become desperate and gamble after the Summer: a marginally enhanced formula will emerge from the IRA, and as a last throw of the dice, David Trimble, armed with a bevy of worthless assurances from the government as to what swift and condign punishments they’ll dispense to Sinn Fein if the IRA doesn’t do exactly what it looks as if it might have said it will do, will decisively lose the intra-UUP fight — roughly one year on from the Council meeting that began this whole stage of the process. In essence, those 12 months will have been how long it took the government to accept the evidence of its own eyes last October.
If Sinn Fein had wanted to stay in politics at the improbable tier David Trimble — for only he could have enabled them to get this far — had allowed them to attain with the Agreement, they should have come to his rescue last week. They didn’t. Their fate will be to be excluded from politics whilst being unable to become again terrorists. The real decision will then lie with Mr Trimble’s successor as UUP leader. Excluded from office, Republicanism will at first resile from politics, and near-certainly resort again to increased levels of terror, but as this is neither the leadership’s preference, nor consistent with achieving any greater results than what terrorism previously gained Republicanism (which is nothing, whilst it was going on), it won’t last. At this point — and the pressure from all points, including, naturally, his own government, will be phenomenal — the new UUP leader will be invited to accept a substantially enhanced, though still intensely unappealing deal from Republicanism. To, in effect, allow them to resume their dignified surrendering all over again, after they had become that little bit too cocky in the old process, and squandered that opportunity. The odds are that he, whoever he is, will sign up for such a deal, to readmit, on ‘reduced pay’, Sinn Fein to provincial politics, simply because the bulwark he would need to confidently resist pressure from Whitehall can only be supplied by the official opposition. There is no credible sign that the party of Brooke and Mayhew and Ancram will provide this back-up.
ERO, May 2, 2003 08:40 AM