Last autumn I had a long discussion about Northern Ireland with John Bruton, the former taoiseach. He told me that the British government’s failure to consider fully, during Brexit negotiations, the awful possibility of a repeat of violence in Northern Ireland has been accentuated over the last two years by the collapse of Northern Ireland’s devolved government at Stormont.
In recent weeks John Bruton’s fears are being realised. Bombardier, the largest private-sector enterprise in Belfast, has proposed the sale of its local company which employs 3,600 skilled workers. This blow to the Belfast region is acute.
The fear of violence being repeated was borne out by the murder of Lyra McKee last month. The presence of leading British and Irish politicians at her funeral was a recognition of the gravity of the current political stalemate in Northern Ireland. The non-functioning of its devolved government has opened up a very dangerous political vacuum. A group calling itself the New IRA has accepted responsibility for Lyra’s murder and has flaunted its presence in the centre of Dublin.
The scandal of Lyra’s murder has resulted in the British and Irish governments formally discussing how devolved government should be restored. This crucial development might well be enhanced by inviting the help of such previous gifted peace negotiators as Bertie Ahern, another former taoiseach, who made a huge contribution to the Anglo-Irish agreement.
Resolving Brexit in a way that includes a customs union in both the UK and in Ireland would be an immense step towards maintaining peace and prosperity in Northern Ireland. If Labour cooperated with other parties, such as my own Liberal Democrat party, we need not lose the real gains in building peace in Northern Ireland that have been achieved in recent years.
Shirley Williams
Liberal Democrats, House of Lords
• In 1938 Christopher Caudwell published a book called Studies in a Dying Culture. That title might well be reused today as the UK has to endure the endless reiteration of fantasies about our past, present and future. The challenges Caudwell recognised in 1938 are not all the same as in 2019, but some of them are: the elevation of simplistic politics of strength and threat, industrial-scale lying and mis-information, and the construction of “others” as threatening.
The potential and achieved tragedies of mass migration, climate change and social inequality are recognised by millions, of people yet these voices have little apparent political connection given that politics in an age of Brexit has become immersed in fantasies about national unity and shared aspirations.
Every time that Theresa May speaks of “the people” she speaks of an illusory unity; ignoring both those who voted against Brexit and those for whom the very function of politics – to address difficult and contentious issues of shared and urgent concern – is being ignored. All that we are given is a highly selective reading of our past, in which unity seldom existed any more than it does at the present. The proponents of that fictional sense of shared national purpose are truly terrifying in that they reproduce all the features of those politics which they think they defeated in 1945. An authoritarian politics of exclusion, privilege and intolerance which should have died but is still all too much alive.
Mary Evans
Canterbury, Kent
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