The secretary of state for health is often considered to be the worst job in the British government: the chance to preside over a broken healthcare system with little thanks given for any marginal improvements made; not to mention the looming threat of war with the junior doctors. The justice secretary, meanwhile, has to oversee the sticky questions of prisons (More prisoners? Boo! Fewer? Booo!). Such are the trade-offs for access to real power – the gift to make yourself incredibly unpopular.
Of course there is one job in government more thankless than health and more Sisyphean than justice. When Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It promises a future promotion to an outgoing minister he says: “When you come back, it’ll be as foreign secretary.” The resigning minister replies, incredulously: “And you mean foreign secretary? That isn’t code for Northern Ireland? I’m not f***ing going there.”
Harsh. But Northern Ireland has long been consigned as a backwater in Westminster’s imagination – at least since the denouement of the Troubles, the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, and the relative stability afforded to the region until 2016. Such an attitude is evidenced by the calibre of politicians offered the posting in the past 14 years. When Karen Bradley held the role (2018-19) she infamously admitted to not knowing that “nationalists don’t vote for unionist parties, and vice versa”. This would not be unlike a junior doctor, on their first day, looking to the chief cardiologist and asking “what’s that thing around his neck?”. Officialdom in Northern Ireland did not even consider Bradley among the worst examples.
The job is an uphill battle. Northern Ireland is knotty and at times intractable. Done well, and it carries little credit: few in Britain think about Northern Ireland (this has not changed much since 1946 when the financial secretary to the Treasury remarked that people tended to forget that Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom). Done badly, and the stakes are rather high – Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom with bloody war in living memory. Mostly, the secretary of state is powerless over whether Sinn Féin or the Democratic Unionist Party decide to pull the rug out from under Stormont and collapse the devolved administration.
But Keir Starmer’s government comes bearing a new disposition: its serious approach evidenced by a serious appointment in Hilary Benn. He is familiar with the brief (those in Stormont remark that he distinguishes himself from recent predecessors with “note taking” and “intelligent questions”). That Starmer prioritised a phone call with Taoiseach Simon Harris on his first day in No 10 is a welcome relief, proof that his government understands that the key to Northern Ireland is good relations between Dublin and London. After the Tories (and Dublin) took a sledgehammer to the Anglo-Irish relationship over Brexit, the Republic’s government is not just optimistic about this overture but positively buoyed.
The Conservatives might fashion themselves as the party of the Union, but their voters are surprisingly agnostic on the existential future of Northern Ireland (YouGov found in 2020 that 53 per cent of their voters “wouldn’t care if Northern Ireland left the UK”). Labour is the real party of Ireland: like the Democrats in the United States, it sees the Good Friday Agreement among its greatest legacies. Tony Blair was one of the few public figures vocal about the Irish border question ahead of Brexit. The years Starmer spent advising the Police Service of Northern Ireland have afforded him necessary hinterland to manage the region’s peculiarities. Forging uneasy coalitions and stripping hot emotion out of the debate is a cornerstone of contemporary Irish politics, north and south – that Starmer has a Cork man among his closest aides is not insignificant in this regard. We will hear the same lines from Labour: Northern Irish peace requires careful keeping; only Starmer’s government has the experience.
Labour will be better than the Conservatives. But the party will reach the same conclusion as its opposite number: Northern Ireland’s problems neither start nor end with London. And while the British government can make things slightly better or slightly worse, these movements are confined to the margins.
Unionists and nationalists alike lament the years of Conservative austerity which left public services in the north in disarray: the NHS is the worst-performing branch in the UK (half of the patients wait a year for treatment, compared with 4 per cent in Britain); earlier this year 170,000 workers shut down almost all government-funded services in protest of low wages; 27 per cent of workers in the north are employed by the state. Politico summed up Northern Ireland in 2024 with a typically rosy disposition: “A land of misery.” Labour can raise wages and increase subsidy all it likes – but this does not change the fact that the north’s economy is on palliative care.
Northern Ireland is bound by a curious cocktail of stasis and instability – the power-sharing arrangement between nationalists and unionists has given tribal enemies (Sinn Féin and the DUP) an effective veto on the functioning of government. This, funnily enough, has proved itself an unsustainable model. For five of the last seven years Northern Ireland has been without a devolved government.
Labour can try to get the region to pay for itself; it can start the process of re-imagining power sharing; it can cleave closer to the European Union to avoid a row over the border. The party can shift the tone too: the truculence of the Conservative Northern Ireland ministers will abate, and with it their clumsy and provocative language. But Starmer – once a soft Irish nationalist, now a committed unionist – will not restructure the DNA of the place, replete with its irreconcilable and competing traditions.
When the UK and Ireland joined the European Economic Community together in 1973 there was a fundamental shift: equality emerged between the states and a common respect for sovereignty guided the countries to 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement was signed. Since then, the position of nationalists north of the border was easier for them to tolerate. By creating a visible exit strategy, enhancing north-south cooperation, and encoding in stricture that the nationalists have a permanent say in the government, orange vs green agitation was defanged.
Brexit took a knife sharpener to this intentionally dulled blade. It provided nationalists with the economic logic for a united Ireland, and reinvigorated a sense that Westminster was leaving Northern Ireland behind. The constructive ambiguity Northern Ireland needs to function was removed by Brexit and, now, there is every sense that what was set in motion in 2016 could be irreversible. This doesn’t mean the country is close to a clean majority for a united Ireland, but, there is a reason the question has shot up the roster of priorities in Dublin and in Stormont. Brexit will haunt the politics of Northern Ireland forever. And a Labour government, no matter its sensibilities and seriousness, will not be a silver bullet.
[See also: Will Keir Starmer scrap the two-child benefit cap?]
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