Stormont regime incapable of agreeing way ahead - Allister
21 October 2010
Extract from a speech last night by Jim Allister to Ballymena TUV:-
“With the DUP/Sinn Fein coalition having failed in its negotiations with the Treasury to stave off the worst of the cuts, particularly in capital spend, the key question now is will it be up to the task of managing the new situation through a sustainable and viable budget? Or, will its dysfunctionalism show through in failure to agree the 3 year budget due in December, with, at best, a sticky plaster stop-gap annual budget cobbled together to get them past the Assembly election, rather than providing a clear road map for how we negotiate the next few years?
“With certainty now attaching to the resource and capital cuts, we need a long-term budget plan to manage the tough times ahead. Instead, I fear, we will get neither direction nor leadership from Stormont, but more of the disjointed failure which characterises this regime.
“There could not be a system of government more unsuited to lead Northern Ireland forward than that which we have. Successful coalitions work because there is an underlying common cause and vision which holds them together, but at Stormont we have the very opposite. Hence the perpetual deadlock and failure. With one half of government Marxist in its economic leanings and set on tying us closer to the fastest sinking economy in Europe, and the other half quasi-conservative in its outlook, we are destined to impasse at a time when we need clear-seeing direction.
“Thus, just as unemployment has already doubled under this regime (23,500 in summer 2007; 58,300 Sept 2010) I see no prospect of the present Stormont government getting together any strategy to arrest this upward spiral.
“Paralysed by competing dogmas they will even fail to make the obvious savings that could be so readily made, choosing rather to pile on the agony on hard-pressed families. £500m could be saved over 5 years by culling the useless north/south bodies and millions more by trimming Stormont, but these sacred cows will be put far above saving jobs!
“It will be a telling commentary on the worthlessness of this regime as increasingly hurting families watch the cuts bite deep everywhere but within the political architecture of the failing Belfast Agreement which sustains the present political elite in office.”
