SDLP's handout addiction

At Unionist Lite O’Neill looks at possible nationalist responses to the government’s deficit plans.  His assessment is that Plaid Cymru and Sinn Féin are beyond help in their analyses, but there is a chance that the SNP and SDLP could, to some degree, embrace opportunities to promote leaner enterprise economies for their respective regions.

The SNP’s ’pork barrel’ tactics are, at least partially, a separatist irritant aimed at London.  So Salmond’s party has a decent opportunity to tacitly accept that Scotland’s economy will benefit from substantial rebalancing.  Although the SDLP has shown signs of original thinking on growth, its dependency culture is more deeply ingrained.

Take Alex Attwood’s  response to proposed coalition welfare reform and its effects on Northern Ireland, where we have the highest level of economic inactivity in the UK.

The government’s view, which will be developed in a report by Ian Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice, launched today in Belfast, is that welfare dependency drives poverty and, therefore, it must be made worth claimants' while to get off benefits and into work.  The Social Development Minister’s view is that Northern Ireland is so dependent on welfare provision it should be exempt from any reform!

In other words, our addiction to benefits is so bad that measures designed to combat that addiction must not apply.  It is a remarkably hopeless philosophy, indicative of a mindset which the SDLP should ditch.

Comments

K D Tennent said…
I think there is a real danger though, that central government is also not thinking about what can replace the benefit culture. I agree with its replacement, but we need to be clear about what is intended - or else the poor may simply turn to crime, or in NI's case, political crime/violence. We need some sort of social entrepenurship scheme or similar, perhaps combined with assisted emigration.
2 September 2010 at 11:38
IJP said…
I agree with much of that, K D, but nevertheless Owen's point stands. We most certainly cannot just leave things the way they are.

At the launch today, Margaret Ritchie provided evidence of what Owen suggests on both counts - she was thoughtful and for the most part sensible, but there was still the underlying idea that we shouldn't make too much effort people getting off benefits because there wasn't enough work here anyway (indeed, implicitly, that others aren't giving us enough work).

The notion that we should create our own work, and/or that actually there has been quite a lot of work out there for the past five years or so and we still had very high economic inactivity rates (and *immigration*) seems somewhat lost amid the excuses for inaction.
2 September 2010 at 16:00
K D Tennent said…
Couldn't agree more - the quicker the dependency culture comes to an end, the better. The NI government needs to accept this and take positive action by looking at what can replace it.
2 September 2010 at 22:35
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retaine...
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro...
Read more