Welcome to New Labour and its New English Vocabulary – The Irish News

It used to be the Americans who came here full of blarney. You know the sort of thing: what wonderful people we are, how highly they think of us and how we have a special place in their hearts.

Now the British are bringing the blarney. Keir Starmer arrived this week bearing no gifts, but armed with a new vocabulary, full of fancy words like “constructive”, “positive” and “productive”.

In fact, he thinks so highly of us (almost as much as Joe Biden) that he intends to “reset the relationship” between London and Belfast.

The Stormont parties loved it. Sinn Féin said he was as different from the Tories as “daylight and darkness”. The DUP indicated they trusted him (they also trusted Boris Johnson, but we won’t mention that) and the SDLP lost a bit of their bearings when they said “This feels like a new dawn”. (For homework, the SDLP are asked to write an essay explaining the difference between optimism and naivety.)

To be fair, you tend to get a better adjective from Starmer than from Sunak, but beyond that it’s hard to find any significant differences in their policies.

Welcome to the world of dictionary politics, where New Labour has planted a new English political vocabulary in Ireland.

It is language that makes no provision for mentioning the 550,000 people on our NHS waiting lists, 35% of whom have been waiting more than two years for treatment. The comparable figure for England is less than 1%.

This is because New English contains no words for Stormont’s lack of accountability. We live in the political equivalent of the dark side of the moon, where no rational light ever shines and where the two largest sectarian parties are assured power without accountability.

This is the inevitable result of the Good Friday Agreement system of government, in which politics will always be sectarian and therefore unaccountable. Starmer boasted that his party was the GFA. The Stormont parties smiled in agreement – ​​and of course, why wouldn’t they?

We cannot be sure how many of those who die while on our hospital waiting lists would have survived if they had received timely medical treatment. However, it is possible that Stormont’s negligence caused more deaths than the Troubles. By arguing over flags, Stormont is exercising its own form of Legacy Act over these NHS deaths.

Ironically, the societies both sides claim to want unity with do not actually exist.

The chocolate box Britain that unionists love is a myth, romanticised, for example, by John Major’s reference to “old maids cycling to Holy Communion in the morning mist”.

This week’s annual fixation of bonfires, sectarian marches and drumbeats is what unionists call British culture and what the British consider a peculiarly Irish form of advanced Morris dancing.

The nationalist perception of Dublin is far removed from what many there call “Nordies”. That’s us. “Boggers” are those who live in the south beyond Dublin. (Brendan Behan joked that those who lived beyond the Red Cow Inn in south Dublin ate their young.)

The fetish for union with Dublin or London absolves Stormont of its responsibilities. The Executive still has no programme for government and no plan for Lough Neagh.

The fetish for union with Dublin or London absolves Stormont of its responsibilities. The Executive still has no programme for government and no plan for Lough Neagh

Starmer knows (from Sue Gray) that extra money will not produce better results. He also knows that no matter how bad public services become here, Sinn Féin and the DUP will still be elected. So he will press Stormont to raise money locally.

Sinn Féin began to prepare us to be charged more for poorer services. Michelle O’Neill made several references to the need for “fiscal levers”, i.e. money-raising powers. (No doubt, across the rolling countryside of east Tyrone, people gather at the crossroads on a summer evening talking about little else.)

So Starmer can be confident that two Conservative parties will always be elected to keep us loyal to his foreign policy of British support for the US and NATO. As long as we don’t invite the Russians, Starmer won’t care how Stormont behaves.

Stormont says it needs an extra £3bn. In response, Starmer offered three adjectives. That’s about £1bn per word, illustrating that New English not only makes for good PR, it’s also a remarkably economical language.

So expect a tsunami of adjectives from across the Irish Sea. However, if you want more money for Stormont, you’ll need to speak fluent Tyronese and ask for fiscal levers.