A do-nothing Programme for a do-nothing Executive

A couple of weeks back, the sixth Northern Ireland Executive released its draft Programme for Government.

Coming over six months after the Executive was formed in February, following a gap in office of around two years, a naive observer might have had high hopes for this document, especially given that, during the election campaign in 2022, most of the parties talked up a good game about getting the government up and running. 

The UUP manifesto said :

it is vital that we have politicians who are willing to work together. We must rebuild the NHS, boost economic recovery and tackle the rising cost of living

Sinn Fein’s made similar comments and added :

Immediately after the election, Sinn Féin stands ready and willing to form a new Executive to deal with the problems people face in their daily lives. By working together, we can bring about real change.

Similarly the DUP, who talked of :

..a five-point plan to build a better future for Northern Ireland within the Union, by fixing our National Health Service and investing £1 billion more in it, growing our economy and creating 20,000 jobs in the next 5 years, helping working families by delivering 30 hours free childcare per week and tackling the cost of living crisis, keeping our schools world-class .. 

And last, but not least, Alliance :

a vote for Alliance is a vote for a party that will work hard for everyone; this manifesto sets out the areas we will prioritise over the next five years to deliver progress for you, your family and your community.

Strip out the constitutional parts, and all of the manifestos are pretty much the same. They all talk about working together, working hard, tackling problems. 

You’d think that with all this clear consensus, a Programme for Government would be straightforward to get drafted and released. But you’d be wrong. They needed over six months just to produce a draft for consultation. That in itself is strange – it’s a long time to create a draft of anything; and why do they need to consult on it ? The consultation was done when the parties presented their manifestos and secured a mandate at the election. Are they really saying that the outcome of the consultation will lead to significant changes in the content ?

Reading the document, you might struggle to find concrete proposals beyond funding decisions that were already announced, or plans to appoint a commission or an adviser. Anyone who is familiar with the management speak that rules the roost in the corporate white-collar world will be familiar with the lexicon of those who want to sound busy while not actually doing anything. This is accomplished with the lavish deployment of weasel words and phrases – “we are committed to …”; “we will prioritise …”; “we will focus on ..”; “we will work to..”; “we will encourage”. 

There’s nothing there that you can challenge; nothing that you can measure. There are no commitments, no risks, no harsh truths, no sense that anyone is going to go out on a limb. A friend once summarised a similar document some years ago : 

1. We like good things
2. We do not like bad things
3. Therefore, we propose to have more good things and fewer bad things

A document like this tells us nothing about what the government is going to do, or what it is going to stop doing. The Executive could sit on its hands, do nothing and still justifiably claim that it implemented its programme, because it doesn’t commit to anything.

Consider this “proposal” for instance :

“We will invest in taking steps to ensure we can deliver long-term change and to stabilise core services”. 

I mean, look at this utter flapdoodle. They’re going to “invest” (invest what?) in “taking steps” (what steps?) to deliver long term change (what is the long term ? what are you changing, and why ?) to stabilise core services (what does a stable service look like compared to an unstable service ? What is a “core” service ? What happens to non-core services ?).

Or this :

“We will seek to achieve self-sufficiency in our own clean and affordable energy.”

The idea is not to achieve, but to “seek to achieve”. What does the seeking look like ? When do we get past the seeking, and get to the achieving ? What is “affordable energy” ?

Our political class must take us all for fools, and perhaps we are, because we keep re-electing them. But this is simply not good enough for a coalition government that has had two years out of office, and another six months in office, to think up ideas on what needs to be done next. It’s also not good enough to blame the NI funding model, or the system of government that exists here. The parties seem to have no proposals or ideas on how to work within the limitations that exist, which are broadly the same limitations that exist in Scotland or Wales. It’s also not good enough to moan about the state of things – the new UK Labour government commissioned a report on the state of the NHS, and it was completed and delivered within weeks.

Contrast with our current Health Minister, whose best idea is to ask Rafael Bengoa to come back and refresh the report he delivered nearly 10 years ago which everyone says they support but which nobody seems to want to implement. The Department of Health is emblematic of the ongoing can-kicking and decision-avoiding that characterises almost every government department here to a greater or lesser extent. 

Elected representatives here have spent the vast bulk of the past 20 years talking about all the hard work they’re going to do. The’ve had lengthy form talking about  “a work-in, not a love-in”. It must be some sort of Northern thing – we love our work-ethic rhetoric and every manifesto includes it. But there are precious few signs of any actual hard work taking place. The fact that they are still putting – literally – their signatures to self-indulgent bromides and trying to pass it off as a programme to do anything indicates to me that nothing is going to change any time soon.

If you’re an elected representative could you please, for God’s sake, stop telling us what you’re going to “tackle” or “work towards” or “prioritise”. Stop making speeches and publishing documents about what is wrong. Instead, tell us what you’re going to do. If you can’t do this, please resign and let someone else do the job instead.

centre-leftish waffler working in IT and living in Belfast

Alliance, but writing in a strictly personal capacity.