Poor Peter: caught in the web of mandatory coalition
01 December 2009
First published: 28th November 2009
Statement by TUV Leader Jim Allister QC
The confusion in DUP thinking is embarrassing.
Peter Robinson now admits the obvious, that his Executive is failing and has lost public confidence; he even rebukes others for clinging to the present arrangements “for fear of change”, but then in face of the self-confessed failure himself clings to the very system he admits has failed!
Last Saturday we had the public renewal of his vows to the partnership with IRA/Sinn Fein at his Conference; last night in Londonderry we had the remarkable admission from a First Minister that his administration has failed and lost public confidence, yet instead of following through on the logic of that reality he clings to the sinking ship and calls for the sticky plaster of voluntary qualified majority, not as a means of forming a government, but as a means of operating a mandatory coalition – the very thing which has failed. It is non sequitur nonsense.
Even though mandatory coalition has spectacularly failed, the DUP Leader demands not the removal of the system – which is in his gift by withdrawing the DUP from what has failed – but the sustaining of the system by pseudo reform. And in making his demand he knows he is whistling in the dark because the very republican veto which makes mandatory coalition unworkable will block his every plaintiff plea for change.
Qualified majority may have a role to play, but that is at the stage of forming a cogent government, not as a means of operating the inoperable.
Poor Peter: enticed into the parlour of mandatory coalition he is now trapped in the web that lured him. Power seemed so attractive, but now he has to admit his government is a disastrous failure and all he can do is make a plaintiff plea to the mythical better nature of those to whom he gifted veto powers to give him some slack. His supplicant pleas will fail, just like the regime he jointly presides over.
Mandatory coalition is irreformable. It has to go. If Peter Robinson faced up to that then he might recover some dignity, but pleading with the veto master for voluntary change just adds to the humiliation.
