Shits #fukDUP and bullshit - a sweary response to the state of play under May

#fukDUP and bad photoshopping

So far I haven't really seen much number crunching about this 'confidence and supply agreement' to prop up Theresa May's weak and unstable tenure as PM.

The Artist Taxi Driver has already eloquently laid out in simple terms what this 'coalition of shit' really means not least for the Barnett formula and so called parity of esteem and Provisional Sinn Fein's equality agenda/ rights discourse in defending these institutions and all the agreements since 1998.

Parity of a steaming pile of shit is exactly how the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is held together. It seems that only now English, Scottish and Welsh taxpayers are finally waking up to what it means to keep this rotten little statelet across the Irish sea afloat.

So some initial thoughts. The first one being there is nothing new in any of this!

Since the last polls closed there has been a lot of coverage from the left in the run up to this focused on Paisley's links to paramilitaries from the Ulster Protestant Volunteers, the Ulster Volunteer Force revived by Gusty Spence in the mid 1960s through Major Bunting's mob, the Ulster Defence Association (legal up until 1992) and it's Ulster Freedom Fighters/ Red Hand Commando fronts for sectarian assassinations to their own attempts in the 1980s with Ulster Resistance and Third Force etc. a lot of that was before the time of most of these commentators but seemingly the murky past is considered to be safer territory. The future might prove to be murkier still.

Harking back to the oft quoted Randolph Churchill, father of one Winston Spencer Churchill the subject of a biography by Boris Johnston but not a mention in Jacob-ReeMogg's upcoming Victorians, playing the 'Orange card' in the late Nineteenth Century which his son repeated a few times in the first half of the Twentieth or Sir Edward Carson lamenting how the initial Conservative and Unionist Party came into being and how (or, more to the point, why) the statelet of Northern Ireland was formed in 1920 does need to be well understood if the ultimate destruction of both are to be speeded up. Even though they are doing quite a good job of it by themselves..

Here I would prefer to focus on the time for which I have been politivally active which began a decade ago when the St Andrews Agreement or Northern Ireland Acts of 2006/ 2007 subsequent to the Belfast or Good Friday Agreemnet of 1998. There followed a big pot of money in the form of not introducing water charges and a variety of infrastructural investments such as the A5 Derry to Dublin PFI road, then came the 2010 Hillsborough Castle Agreement which carried on the Blairite Direct Rulers Maze-Long Kesk Regeneration alongside the other Reinvestment and Reform Initiative where former MoD assets were generously gifted (along with the costly remediation work carried out by the NI Civil Service in particular the Office of First Minister and deputy First Minister (OFMDFM)) . The figure of £500 million is curiously similar to that which was to be removed from the block grant to lower corporation tax or harmonse in the Shinner's parlance to that apparently paid by the US multinationals based in the South. The apparent reshoring promised by Trump has so far failed to materialise although just today I heard that threat is now frequently deployed by middle managers in some of their concerns in the South-West.

To take it back in time and closer to the borderlands (the crux of the matter) both Paisley and Peter 'the Clontibrit One' Robinson are gone. Paisleyism, his direct heirs and the Free Presbyterian Church are pratcially an irrelevance albeit a good moneyspinner for the McCrae dynasty less so Seymour Sweeney. Besides Doopety Dodds the biggest sponger we've sent over outside Number 10 stood both the longest serving Norn Irish MP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and their party leader Arlene Foster. While the former is a Paisleyite stalwart the latter two jumped ship from the UUP in 2004.

Both represent a different class of Ulster Protestant than the bible-bashing lumpen lost tribe of Israel. They are Established Church, landed gentry types with less bowler hats on show than their predecessors Brookebourogh and Chichester-Clarke but still completely tied into the Crown forces (Arlene's RUC father was shot and wounded in front of her while Jeffrey was a Corporel in the Ulster Defence Regiment and his brother was in Iraq and remained on in the Reservists) indeed I only discovered today that he worked in South Down for Enoch Powell when that proto-fascist tried to edge in here in the 1980s. The boul Jeffrey then jumped over to the safe seat of Lagan Valley and it's garrison towns and prison/ military industrial complex.

All this has a bearing on the type of deal struck today. Indeed its very wording is a Godsend to the militarists with all the talk of an Armed Forces Covenant with its inferences less to do with the most recent Aliens franchise but going right back to Charles I's dealings with the Scots and channelled by Craig and Carson in the 'Ulster Crisis'.

The recent barbaric if desperate attacks on tourists and teenagers in London and Manchester is no doubt being deployed to further erode civil liberties and enhance the secret state in the interests of 'National Security' and all this will have repercussions for the current settlement and for political activists in Ireland as well as throughout the neighbouring island. But that is what they want you to think as Adam Curtis might say.

The only real issue here at the minute is will these talks go ahead by the June 29h deadline. The calls for Foster to go as a redline issue for the new leader of the New Sinn Fein leadership in transition have since evaporated once Adams stepped in front of the media yet now Sinn Fein have apparently been completely blindsided in their negotiations with the DUP, let down by both the British and Irish Governments as co-guarantors of the 1998 Agreement and all that has followed it. Harping back to the unelected Blueshirt Free State Leader himself just back from a cringe worthy, fawning appearance in Westminster doesn't exactly fill you with hope.

There is too much to document and I have lost track in terms of the recent spate of Agreements following crisis talks about talks over the last 5 years to keep these amazingly superfluous institutions up and running. But a key point is that over the past decade the neoliberal economic policy and austerity and increasingly anti-austerity politicking all played a part in staving off the implementation of the Tories Welfare Reform Bill and while Trade Union opposition to both it and public sector job cuts collapsed after a strike being called in early 2015 it is clear that the DUP are trying to save their skin by being seen to 'amelerioate' the worst excesses of their social policy. Sadly today we see that the NIC-ICTU see their role as Social Partners to lobby the governmment by echoing back their pro-captalist and pro-imperialist policies. 

As mentioned above the previous agreements wrote into their policing and justice (read security) spend a quid pro quo of infrastructure in this latest document it is the York Street interchange which gets named as its funding was reliant on European Structural Funds but no doubt the A5 and Maze-Long Kesh sites continue to haunt the landscape and as exposed the

The other sectors besides construction and roadbuilding is agri-business (funny how they also did very well out of the Renewable heating Incentive?) so the replacement of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy subsidies which was shown to benefit big landholders like Duke of Abercorn and dairies despite the massive overproduction in plant expansions in Strabane and the South of Ireland causing a fall in milk prices.

So while the UK's Embassies go to work up to make up for the junket that is Invest NI and the sell-off of locally owned assets and enterprises continues apace one things seems certain.. *attempts best Rev. Dr,  Ian Richard Kyle Pailey impersonation when he mobilised to cause Unionist Prime Minister Faulkner's downfall * Mrs Foster the time has not yet come for you to go!

(good photoshop bro!)