I found that too! As I said, I was up until nearly 2 reading about UK politics as well as following any Sinn Féin tags on Twitter today. So, do they get elected based on the fact that they won’t take their seats?
I’ll also say it felt good to focus on something other than my own shitshow of a country.
I’m not a constitutional expert, but wouldn’t a coalition bind you to collective ministerial responsibility in a way that a confidence and supply arrangement would not?
As I understand it they get funding based on number of seats; also they keep out the DUP.
Their voters must be happy with them being abstentionist too, otherwise they would be voting SDLP.
Yes, but you get ministerial positions and can implement policies. For example, the Lib Dems were behind the increase in the personal allowance (the point at which you start paying income tax) to above £10k and the legalisation of gay marriage. This wouldn’t have been possible with a confidence and supply arrangement, but you’d still get blamed for propping up the government.
You seek the abolition of the so-called “republic” of Ireland and its institutions and the resurrection of the 32-county republic proclaimed at the Easter Rising in 1916 and ratified by the 1st Dáil Éireann in 1919?
(I kid, I kid. IIRC, Sinn Féin abandoned this fundamentalist approach to Republicanism and recognised the current Republic of Ireland in 1987, which led to the 32 County Sovereignty Committee splitting from the party and Continuity IRA splitting from the Provisionals. The genealogy of Irish Republicanism is fascinating: for example, the two biggest Irish political parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, both originated in splits within Sinn Féin; and pretty much every non-Unionist armed group in Ireland, including the official defence forces of the current Republic, is descended from the original IRA of 1919; the Irish Defence Forces and every incarnation there’s been of the IRA all claim the same Gaelic name, Óglaigh na hÉireann, “Volunteers of Ireland”).
But you would have more freedom to oppose policies you disagreed with, without necessarily withdrawing your support in votes of confidence and on money bills.
Yes, but that’s all you get to do. You don’t get to implement any of your own policies and if you don’t want to do that then, quite frankly, you’re wasting your time in politics.
Republicans take this shit seriously. One of the main causes of the Irish Civil War was that, under the Anglo-Irish Treaty, members of the Dáil (Irish parliament) would still have to swear allegiance to the British monarch.
But you do have a certain amount of leverage in persuading the ruling party to adopt and implement them. Swings and roundabouts.
I suspect most of them in fact do differ from Daesh. they are outliers in a number of ways, from stuff like this to their treatment of non-Muslims.
So, I just saw on Twitter that Sinn Féin are saying that the Tories are in breach of the Good Friday Agreement by forming a coalition with the DUP. Help, please. How big a deal is that? It’s so difficult to get perspective on the ramifications of something, lately.
indicates that those on the celtic fringe like fringe parties.
What’s the point in voting in Sinn Fein if they won’t take their seats? Sort of a giant “Fuck you” to the Brits?
(I read that Sinn Fein is pretty well positioned to speak for the majority of Northern Irish on Brexit-- but instead, DUP can claim that the Irish position isn’t.)
Same. I’ve become fascinated by Corbyn. The hate he receives from Very Important People is oh so telling. I saw a comment over on the Graun that stayed with me-
“Jeremy speaks the truth, even when it hurts him” (paraphrased)
This once was a quality lionized in our politicians (even if it’s more myth than reality) that seems completely unnecessary these days. I hesitate to compare him to Sanders as many Usians often do- from where I sit Corbyn is by far truer to his socialist roots, but they both project a similar base integrity that is difficult not to admire. I sincerely hope we’ve witnessed a bit of a bellwether this morning.
If it’s true, huge. It’s the political agreement brokered between the British govt, the NI political parties and the Irish govt. It’s the compromise that means that we have (relative) peace, and that the two sides and the British Army in NI aren’t tearing each other apart and the mainland isn’t still exercising our prolonged and extensive experience of dealing with terror attacks, that we gained long before ISIS.
The agreement is already somewhat vulnerable due to the implications of an unknown Brexit on our collective relationship with Ireland (especially, but not limited to border controls) and if I remember correctly the fact that the EU legal system and courts are ‘baked in’ as an underpinning of the same agreement.
[Caveat: while I’m British, I’m not an expert on the agreement, I just have a general understanding - and am happy to be corrected by people who live with it. ]
But not a lot of leverage, and only really where interests overlap or there is no conflict. In both the cases I mentioned (tax threshold, gay marriage) the Tories (or at least the right wing, which is the bulk of them nowadays) were ideologically opposed to them. There is no leverage the Lib Dems could have brought to get them legislated.
What would have happened in a confidence and supply arrangement is that they would have tried to push through a bunch of legislation that the Lib Dems couldn’t support, said we can’t govern like this, called a quick election (no Fixed Term Parliament act to stop them). They would have been the only one’s with enough money to run a decent campaign and they would have got a majority.
That’s interesting. I don’t know for sure what they mean by that; this is my best guess, which needs a bit of background.
For about 50 years, from 1922 (when the rest of Ireland became effectively independent) to the early 1970s, Northern Ireland had its own devolved parliament and government within the UK. The boundaries of Northern Ireland had been drawn to give the Protestant Unionists a natural majority; they then used that majority to gerrymander the shit out of the Province, condemning the Catholic Nationalists to political impotence (e.g., the city of Derry was overwhelmingly Catholic, yet the city council was dominated by Protestants).
In the face of rising violence from both sides (and some seriously questionable actions by the devolved authorities, including the machine-gunning of an apartment block), the UK government shut down the Northern Irish institutions and imposed direct rule.
When devolution was restored under the Good Friday Agreement, a key principle was to avoid the possibility of one community dominating the other. So all Northern Irish administrations are now coalitions, with ministerial positions parcelled out in proportion to seats won in the assembly: this is how the Unionist firebrand Ian Paisley ended up as First Minister with Martin McGuinness, a former quartermaster of the Provisional IRA, as his deputy.
So I think Sinn Féin may be saying that a coalition or similar deal between the Tories and the DUP puts the latter into a position of influence that violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the Good Friday Agreement.[quote=“Jilly, post:93, topic:102431”]
Help, please. How big a deal is that? It’s so difficult to get perspective on the ramifications of something, lately.
[/quote]
Worst case scenario, if the GFA does collapse, I guess we could see a return to the violence of the seventies-to-nineties, though I hope we’ve come too far for that to be a realistic possibility.
It could just be political posturing, or it could be the end of the Peace Process leading to the rearming of the IRA and the resumption of the Troubles. It’s hard to say.
MPs don’t just vote in Parliament: they also pursue the interests of their constituents at local levels. E.g., someone I know faced months of bureaucratic intransigence and lack of interest from her local authority regarding a particular problem: a letter to her MP provoked a letter from that MP to the council, and lo and behold the problem was solved. And a Sinn Féin MP will have more influence with a Sinn Féin council (there is no abstentionist policy with respect to local government) than, say, an SDLP MP.
Oh, is that all? Note to self: Go play “pet hospital” with daughter, RIGHT NOW. That stuffed dog isn’t going to heal himself.
