Presumably, this is the start of the process of shoving the shit of Brexit down the throats of the weaker parts of the United Kingdom so others can get the benefits.
Maybe only emotional ones. But the costs are hardly spread evenly.
I think the big change is that Brexit makes it completely inevitable that Irish unification is happening within our lifetimes, and that's a tough pill for a lot of people to swallow.
Just because something makes sense doesn't make it inevitable, as Brexit demonstrates.
Here's a Northern Ireland politics question, I usually feel like in a FPTP system my civic duty is to vote for whichever of the top two candidates I prefer, and that "protest votes" are bad. (Of course I understand that people disagree with this point, and perhaps they're right.) But Northern Ireland is the one exception I can think of to that rule, if I lived there I wouldn't vote for Sinn Fein. (I'd vote for whichever of SDLP or Alliance is more competitive in that particular election.) But of course I don't know about the politics of all countries, so my question is whether there are other countries that also have this property that both of the main to parties are beyond the pale (pun intended).
6: Irish Unification always made sense, it's Brexit that made it inevitable. Polling went from the 20s to the 40s and there's a big generational split, there's probably already a clear majority for unification among people under 40, and the younger you are the less connection to the UK there is.
The obvious solution is to split Northern Ireland.
8: And in the UK there's a clear majority for the EU, no cohorts attached. More probable, fine. Inevitable? No such thing.
Yeah. It seems like a weird thing to be optimistic about given history, recent and not.
Sure, nothing's inevitable, but I do think Brexit took it from something like a 15% chance over the next 30 years to something like a 90% chance over the next 30 years. There's also a key difference between Irish unification and undoing Brexit or Indyref2, which is that there's statutory provisions that make it difficult for the UK government to block a poll. They've already agreed to hold a poll if it's likely to pass.
Well, if it all ever does get worked out, and people from Belfast or Derry are missing the random searches, armored vehicles in residential neighborhoods, wanton police brutality, unjust arrests and state-sanctioned murder, I think I know someplace they'd feel right a home.
I don't know about the politics of all countries, so my question is whether there are other countries that also have this property that both of the main to parties are beyond the pale (pun intended).
My Irish friends would say Ireland (FF/FG, though also SF).
Related to heebie's important question: Does everyone know the cast of Derry Girls did an episode of GBBO? It's delightful.
I don't understand RoI politics at all... Do I understand right that there's very little policy difference between the two major parties, but instead they disagree vehemently about decisions Michael Collins made a hundred years ago?
Someday, I'm going to figure how closely I am related to him. My great grandmother was a Collins from Cork, but the other end of the county.
17: That's my understanding, but I can't say I'm well versed either.
Still though, I feel like if I lived there I would pick whichever of FF/FG I thought was better in that election and vote for them, I don't think either comes anywhere close to line for me. (The most borderline case I can think of off the top of my head is if I lived in the West Bank, where I think I'd vote for Fatah but I'd feel conflicted.)
15: I'd hazard most countries in Africa and Latin America.
I feel like in most of Latin America there's a major left-of-center party that's not full-on communists, and I'd vote for them. Maybe Venezuela is a problem, but I don't see why other Latin American countries would be too difficult.
Still though, I feel like if I lived there I would pick whichever of FF/FG I thought was better in that election and vote for them, I don't think either comes anywhere close to line for me.
For my friends I think even those potentially inclined to vote FF were forever put off by their role in the financial crisis, in the lead-up to and onset of which Ireland royally fucked up, though to be fair they did better from about 2009 on than a lot of Europe.
In South Africa I think I'm pretty obviously a Democratic Alliance voter who would be a gettable vote for the right ANC candidate, I don't know even a little bit about politics in other African countries.
There's also a key difference between Irish unification and undoing Brexit or Indyref2, which is that there's statutory provisions that make it difficult for the UK government to block a poll.
I just looked up border polls. It looks like the British secretary of state still has final say? Is there another trigger I'm not finding?
I pay a lot of attention to Irish and British politics but I'm also massively naive, so corrections appreciated:
Brexit is the main reason. The more idiotic loyalists thought that Brexit would increase the strength of the Irish border. That's a concern for them since the demographics mean that the GFA requires a reunification poll happen soon. Everybody figured out that having a border between London and Paris means that one of (England, NI), (NI, RoI), and (RoI, France) requires a border, but they thought they had the strongest hand for getting that (NI, RoI) border. What they didn't realize is that the Tories are increasingly a little-England party and would be fine throwing both the DUP and Northern Ireland to the curb (uh, kerb) as soon as they could. (I doubt Boris wants to be The Man Who Broke Up The United Kingdom, but it would strengthen the party's hand in the short/medium-term.) There's an intense feeling of betrayal, which has led to some pretty weird and amusing schadenfreude from nationalists.
Add in the proximate cause: the police there, the PSNI, chose not to prosecute Sinn Féin big wigs who went to a political funeral last summer when that was forbidden under COVID rules. Probably would've been bad politics to prosecute. DUP leaders called for the PSNI head to resign, which he refused. The sense that there was one rule for us, a different rule for them rankled. (Never mind that there is a degree of hypocrisy here. I'm pretty sure there were fairly uncontrolled, non-socially distanced celebrations in Belfast after the Rangers won.)
And hey, we're all stressed out because of the pandemic. Some of us troll more online. Others of us throw petrol bombs at buses.
There was a fun Twitter thread recently of an Irish woman trolling English guys on Tinder, asking them what they knew about Northern Ireland. I think maybe one guy in the first twenty-five she talked to had half a clue. Their main knowledge of Northern Ireland was "IRA bad."
Each election in Israel it seems to be a little harder for my mom to choose a party. But since she gets to make another choice 6 months later I don't see what the big deal is.
20: Hypothetically Irish you might not even have to make that choice, given the strong tradition of independent TDs. It is so weird that the contingencies of Irish history mean that the two main parties are both broadly center-right in a non-FPTP system, though.
26: I think so, but they're required by the treaty to start the poll with whatever the local equivalent to "with due haste" is. The Tories haven't shown any particular interest in violating the treaty so far, and it might be worth it to show that they're team players on something they don't really care about so they can be more intransigent about something else.
26: What I was seeing was that it's worded as "the Secretary of State shall call," but there does seem to be some disagreement about how mandatory that is. Of course the SoS could just not do so, but I do think it's a bit different that the UK government has already agreed that there should be a border poll under certain circumstances.
25: In South Africa there are no candidates, only parties. If you think you could vote ANC either you don't know even a little bit about politics in SA or I don't know even a little bit about you.
In Israel I think I'm a Labour --> Kadima --> Joint List voter, but they're definitely proportional so there's no need to vote for a leading party.
Feels like Israel is speed-running democracy, hoping they can hit the RNG just right to glitch Netanyahu out of power. (This made more sense in my head, I swear.)
31: You're probably right, I was thinking I would have voted for Mandela and from the little I know Ramaphosa seems to be doing reasonably well, and that Democratic Alliance is to my right politically so not an entirely natural home, but I do in fact know very little.
Yeah, the "shall" is only after the SoS makes a discretionary finding of fact that a vote for independence is "likely", and it seems like even if opinion polls flip, they could still make any number of motivated arguments without recourse (like the Scottish experience).
Still, that means a change in government or political circumstances could go a long way, so a 30-year window for it happening makes sense.
Do Labour have a more detailed position on when to have a border poll, or are they silent?
Does RoI actually want unification? Like, if a bag of burning shit knocked on my door and asked to move in, I would have reservations.
35: They could--a treaty is just words--but they're dealing with an international treaty with another independent state, along with an interested and powerful supernational entity. And the threat of violence is ever-present. This is not Scotland.
36: It's complicated. Yes, but people don't really want to pay for it, and I gather a lot of the current class of politicians (outside SF) would rather it just go away for now. They aren't ideological revolutionaries. Daniel Keohane is a good follow on this; he often goes over what it might entail, e.g. devolved government in all or part of the North.
I'm looking forward to the stereotype of the lazy English lounging on the taxes hardworking Irish.
I too enjoyed the Derry Girls/GBBO holiday special. Solidarity with 16!
And I just finished teaching a class online while having serious network connection issues. It went terribly, and I just can't really handle knowing that I have 5 more weeks of this still.
36. Most people I know in RoI feel like they'd have to support unification because history + will of the people in the 6 counties = if they want reunification we'll have to find some to do it ÷ who's going to pay for it?
36. Most people I know in RoI feel like they'd have to support unification because history + will of the people in the 6 counties = if they want reunification we'll have to find some to do it ÷ who's going to pay for it?
36. Most people I know in RoI feel like they'd have to support unification because history + will of the people in the 6 counties = if they want reunification we'll have to find some to do it ÷ who's going to pay for it?
Sorry about that, can somebody please delete two of them.
It's Ireland, so you have to iterate for about 400 years.
Are the Northern Irish getting access to COVID vaccines at the same rate as the rest of the UK? What's the situation like in the Republic? If they're getting vaccines much faster than other countries, they might be inclined to feel some partiality to the UK.
I didn't understand 31.
I'm now living in my 3rd country where I don't really understand the politics. I feel like you need to spend 20 years paying attention to it or something.
48 And of course the premise of the game is that you're someone you aren't. I'm just not good enough at suspending disbelief to imagine myself a South African (e.g.) voter. Am I 60, white, a lawyer, with the US-ian life experiences I've had, who's just been magically transported? Am I voting for a program without any cultural context?
AIPMB, I was in St. Lucia during the runup to the 2001 elections. There were trucks driving around full of people in the back wearing matching colored T-shirts. Reds, purples, and yellows, anyway: I'd met the sometime leader of the yellow party, a pretty impressive fellow, but that wouldn't have been enough to vote for them.
47: Pretty much. Maybe a bit ahead of England and I think a bit behind Scotland. Ireland is pretty similar to the rest of the EU, significantly behind total shots administered in the UK. The export of vaccines from the EU to the UK has been controversial at times, although maybe that's calmed down a bit since (continental) Europeans are very down on the AstraZeneca vaccine right now.
I guess this might change on the margins how some Northern Irish feel about the EU and thus Irish reunification, but my guess is the effect is small. Going the other way, the UK has more than double the per capita deaths of Ireland, so they aren't going to get great marks for technocratic competence, either.
*total shots administered should be total shots administered per capita; the distinction I was trying to make is that the UK has used a first-jabs-first strategy so their fully-vaccinated numbers don't tell the whole story.
49.1: For me the counterfactuals are pretty easy, because there's universities everywhere. I interviewed in Canada and applied to jobs in NZ and Scotland, and there's certainly places in England, and especially Australia that I would have applied to if they'd been hiring. I don't know departments in Ireland (north or south) that are natural fits, but it's easy to imagine a world where they are. My research as a postdoc went well enough that I wouldn't have considered jobs in South Africa, but there's a guy in my field at a top university there that I certainly would have looked into if my research had gone a little bit less well. I had a temporary job in Germany, and if I hadn't gotten a TT job I would have taken a temporary position in Denmark. It's still plausible that I might move abroad at some point.
Try the lager in Denmark. It's very good.
I keep wondering with the issues around US higher education whether some country is going to make a serious play to take over as the main center of research (like the US did to Germany), but instead it seems like a general race to the bottom everywhere.
The West Bank is genuinely implausible, as is pretty much anywhere in Africa other than South Africa (if I try hard enough maybe I can imagine a counterfactual involving Ghana). In Latin America, counterfactuals for Brazil, Argentina, or Colombia are pretty easy (though probably involve macroeconomics taking a somewhat different turn), and Mexico or Chile aren't completely implausible.
56: We have an awfully strong combination of large population, high research spending in both absolute and per capita terms, and opportunities to leverage public research funding into private wealth. This list suggests that nobody is likely to catch us any time soon. China has the population and the absolute level of funding to make a run, but the political complexities will be in the way for the foreseeable future.
And Germany remains no slouch. They're just smaller than the US.
Why would unification be so expensive?
Internet suggests something called "subvention." Basically Northern Ireland is poor and thus a drain on government spending relative to revenue. Also perhaps a 1-time payment to the UK for the NI portion of the UK debt. Of course everyone argues about how much all of this amounts to, and it's a little unclear what the right answer is.
Compare this to this. If I'm comparing those correctly, not to say that I am, Northern Ireland's budget deficit is about 10% of the Republic's total income. While they've actually run a small surplus in the last few years, it's not close to enough. Then keep in mind that Ireland does not control its monetary policy, giving it fewer tools to handle that, and there's going to be a big one-time cost integrating the two systems.
The unified government could choose not to match the level of subsidies and services currently supplied by Britain--which people already consider insufficient, given the state of the Belfast-to-Derry motorway--but that seems like a bad idea.
The obvious solution is to split Northern Ireland.
Already happened.
16/40: Just watched a YouTube clip of this. Lovely. Seeing the nun actress out of habit is absolutely uncanny, as much as the real thing would've been.
We had nuns in school, but they didn't wear habits (except the older ones who were basically retired but would sub).
65: Yeah, my school too. The retired nuns were totally old-school, and had names like Sister Margaret Mary Ignatius, or Sister Mary Agnes Philomena...
South Africa is definitely a contender for protest votes. The DA keeps reminding everyone that it's beholden to a core voting bloc of racists. The ANC is deeply corrupt, though factionally split, so you can choose your flavor: outright theft with a side of political murder, or McKinsey-style technocratic graft. The EFF have the best policies, but also the worst ones, and are pretty overtly opposed to the fundamental institutions of liberal democracy. And no one else matters.
Every few years, there's a promise of some realignment that will produce a reasonable opposition, but it either fizzles out (Cope) or ends up being terrible (EFF).
Most of my friends voted ANC the last time, when Ramaphosa was running, and either DA or EFF the time before that, when it was Zuma. But there are genuinely no palatable choices.
so you can choose your flavor: outright theft with a side of political murder, or McKinsey-style technocratic graft.
I mean, the second one right? Am I missing something?
67.last makes me feel vindicated, I'd worried I'd said something really dumb in 25, but now it seems like it was probably about right.
Of course the problem with a protest vote in SA is it doesn't seem like there's obviously better non-viable parties. As opposed to Northern Ireland say, where SDLP and Alliance both are perfectly nice parties, they're just not competitive in most constituencies. (Realistically though if I live in Northern Ireland I'd be in Belfast South and could vote SDLP with no qualms.)
The DA keeps reminding everyone that it's beholden to a core voting bloc of racists.
I wonder what it's like to live in a country with that?
Some days I feel like I'm too beholden to the Democratic Party. Other days, that I don't do enough for it.
TBC, my 31 was to damn the ANC, not to endorse anyone else. I second everything in 67, but think it's too kind to the ANC. I think the organization is rotten to the bone, and there's no reason to think it will produce anything resembling good governance, whether as an internal faction or as a new breakaway party.
And for Upetgi and Walt, when I say there are no candidates, I mean it's a party list system. The parties choose their lists through their own infighting, then put the lists before the public, take it or leave it. The general public cannot directly vote for the bad or less-bad ANC factions.
73: Do you have to be an elected official to join the party? Can onr join the party one thinks is least bad and work on changing the list of candidates?
If you try to kick off the wrong person, that's probably where the side of political murder comes in.
75 is correct, and the biggest problem with the ANC. The Ramaphosa faction would probably be the least-bad choice, but it's not in control of the party enough to kick out the others. And the least-bad folks are pretty corrupt in their own way, as well as largely failing to deliver on any of the technocratic promises being made.
SA politics seems like it's kinda close to these counterfactuals where it's like "Would I vote for a Republican if the Republican was Romney and the Democrat was [worst Democrat I can think of]." Like Romney is not the worst, but boy would you still end up with a lot of power for racists.
Each person who masturbates to Bernie Madoff has to find five more people to masturbate to Bernie Madoff.
Then keep in mind that Ireland does not control its monetary policy, giving it fewer tools to handle that, and there's going to be a big one-time cost integrating the two systems.
Are EU subsidies in the ballpark of an amount that could help fill this gap?
80: It's really hard to see a great analysis of this because everyone has an axe to grind. I'm sure EU subsidies would help, and there's issues like the UK having a reasonably large defense budget that you just don't have in Ireland, but at first glance the subsidies to Northern Ireland are really quite large.
According to this, the majority of European Regional Development Fund is infrastructure spending, so that wouldn't necessarily help the budget. Only if it substitutes for projects the government would have done anyway.
