At every opportunity three of the four main parties here demand an election. When members of the same parties meet US politicians they try to encourage them to support the demand too. The Irish government takes the same line. Understandably the Ulster Unionist Party keeps mum. As always, the default position for the NIO is to support the UUP.
The UUP's silence is understandable not because the DUP might win more seats but because the UUP is in bits and some of the bits would align with the DUP in crucial votes in any assembly. The likelihood is that, in such circumstances, the UUP would disintegrate into even more bits.
All fascinating stuff, if you're a politician that is, or if you take an unhealthy interest in electoral statistics. Most people don't, a fact which politicians find hard to believe since they think of little else. The truth is that all the angst about elections hasn't carried across to the people our politicians hope would vote in this election they demand. The truth is boys and girls, lads and lasses, the public don't care.
Let's draw a discreet veil over the Sinn Féin protest day on, ahm, when was it? May 29 perhaps? Everyone was supposed to pour onto the streets full of indignation that Tony Blair had denied people their right to vote. Nobody poured out, nobody even noticed they didn't. Blaming Tony Blair, in other words 'the Bratash', is about the only chance there is of generating any interest in the absence of an election. The line is that 'the Bratash' have no right to prevent Irish people from voting. Quite correct if you support the spirit and indeed the letter of the agreement which stipulates an election three months ago.
It didn't work though. Nobody marched to demonstrate. No placards saying 'We demand the right to vote'. You haven't noticed the letter pages of newspapers stuffed with angry epistles supporting the demand for an election. Nope, it's all about Israel and human rights. There is quite simply no public demand for an election. Our local politicians, now rapidly becoming ex-politicians, are going to have to revise the use of that word 'demand'. It seems they are the only people who demand an election.
Perhaps the truth is that they are the only people who demand an assembly because on the four occasions when the executive was pulled down either by the proconsul of the time or David Trimble, there were no signs of public disquiet, no crowds in the streets, no... well no-one actually.
On the other hand there certainly is public disquiet that our former assembly members are pulling in around £20,000 a year for doing nothing and let's not hear any tearful nonsense from former assembly members about sitting up at Stormont answering the phone and writing letters on behalf of constituents. They don't have the clout of a wet dishcloth. So, repeat, doing nothing.
People are fed up watching their noses snuffling in the trough. Too many of them earning too much and claiming expenses for opening their front door. The Office of First and Deputy First Minister, ridiculously abbreviated to OFMDFM, but not abbreviated in any other way. More civil servants and advisers than Tony Blair's Cabinet office. Can you believe it? With a press office costing, wait for it, £1,145,000 last year compared to the whole NIO's £1,877,000. For a population of 1,680,000? Please. Delusions of grandeur or what?
Compare it all to the Scottish Parliament. They haven't stinted themselves either with an OFMDFM too, plus nine ministers and eight junior ministers and a Lord Advocate and a Solicitor-General with offices. However, there are five million of them and they have a real Parliament and their own legal system and a real economy and, let's face it, they're a country.
Look at the Wales Office as they call it now: a secretary of state, sort of, and one junior minister for a population of 2.9 million. The Welsh assembly has 60 members for a population nearly twice as big as here. Don't forget either that we have a proconsul whose lavish appurtenances cost millions, not to mention his two part-time ministers of state and two part-time juniors. It's said each of them spends almost 14 hours a week here, but not all at the same time.
Any wonder people are disgusted with the whole set up? Even if they weren't, the bottom line is nobody noticed any difference when the bloated assembly was belching forth its miasma from Stormont.
That may be one of the reasons the only people who demand the whole self-indulgent circus be resurrected are the clowns themselves.
A clown looks so out of place without a circus.
