Newsletter #11: Ireland votes for the status quo

PLUS: Tories flash ankles on immigration; Euthanasia; and the Chagos Islands (again)

Good morning.

Kemi Badenoch has finally made a speech about policy — in fact, on immigration policy, no less. Unfortunately, although it was a policy speech at the Centre for Policy Studies, it seems to have contained remarkably little in terms of, well, policy… though what were we expecting? But first: the Irish election.

This newsletter’s agenda: Irish General Election: a vote for the status quo (free); Senior Tories flash ankles on immigration: Kemi Badenoch & Chris Philp’s press conference at the CPS (paid); The ‘Assisted Dying’ Bill (paid); Cold water on the Chagos Islands deal? (paid).

The first half of this newsletter is free. Upgrade to a paid subscription — £8/month, or £80/year — to read the rest.

Irish General Election: a vote for the status quo

Crime boss Gerry Hutch, who came close to winning a seat in Dublin Central.

Ireland has voted for the status quo. For the first time in decades, the combined first-preference vote (FPV) share of the three traditional parties — Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the Labour Party — has not declined, and there is likely to be a third consecutive power-sharing arrangement (and second consecutive coalition) between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

For the completely uninitiated (others should skip forward a few paragraphs), Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael both originate from the Sinn Féin party, founded in 1905, and were formed out of the factions which opposed and supported the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty respectively. This conflict led to the Irish Civil War, in which the pro-treaty faction were victorious. The present Sinn Féin party are one of the many branches of the rump Sinn Féin left after the formation of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

Both parties are conventionally labelled as ‘centre-right’, but this is not quite correct. Fine Gael (meaning: Family of Gaels) are a classic Christian Democratic party. They have drawn their strongest support from urban professionals in South Dublin, larger farmers, and Ireland’s well-off Protestant minority. Because of their civil war origins, they have generally taken a softer approach to Northern Ireland, and were criticised for signing the 1985 Anglo-Irish Treaty, due to its tacit recognition of Northern Ireland (later formally recognised in 1998).

Fianna Fáil (meaning: Soldiers of Destiny) are sui generis. They are best described as a party of the populist centre, and have no real European parallels. The party is pragmatic rather than ideological, and has a history of ludicrous tax giveaways (e.g., the abolition of domestic rates in 1977, which helped precipitate a debt crisis and depression). They are the main practitioners of Ireland’s ‘cute hoorism’ (i.e., corruption). In fact, two of the party’s longest-serving Prime Ministers (Bertie Ahern and Charles Haughey) have taken bribes in office. (Haughey even purchased a country palace and estate worth eight figures while he was Minister for Finance.) They have historically drawn their strongest support from the urban poor, public sector workers, and small farmers. In recent years, however, Fianna Fáil have lost much of their traditional working-class support to a resurgent Sinn Féin.

The consensus explanation for why Ireland never developed the typical Left-Right politics of most of the rest of Europe is that it had an unresolved national question; and that it is an unusually rural country by the standards of Western Europe, and therefore never had the base for a strong union or labour movement.

The only thing which will change in the new government will be their coalition partners. The Green Party have lost seats due to reputational damage from their time in coalition (the usual fate of small Irish parties working with the big boys). There will also be a change in Prime Minister from Fine Gael’s Simon Harris to Fianna Fáil’s Micheál Martin (as Fianna Fáil look likely to win the most seats). The coalition will be completed by a combination of independents, Labour, and what remains of the Greens. The result? There will be no relief for Fionn (30 ans). The point at which the marginal tax rate approaches 50% is likely to remain at €42,000, and the government will continue its toxic policy of pairing extreme NIMBYism with truly staggering levels of immigration.

A Sinn Féin-led coalition is unlikely due to the decline in their share of the FPV from 24.5% to 19.0%, and the factionalism of the Irish Left. Labour and the Greens have been victims of their own pragmatism, as their time in coalition with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in previous years has damaged the perception of them as being authentic, unadulterated ‘Left’ parties. Other players within the Irish Left are unwilling to work with them, making the parliamentary arithmetic of a ‘Left’ grand coalition impossible. The Social Democrats, the ‘most improved’ party in this election, were founded by former Labour MPs in response to the complicity of the Labour Party in the 2011-16 coalition government’s austerity programme; they have mostly soaked up Green votes. The Trotskyist outfit ‘People before Profit’ were one of the main beneficiaries of the Labour Party’s implosion in the ’10s.

However, while from the above this may look like a rout for the Irish Left, the results need to be placed in the context of Irish history. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil would typically win up to 80% of the FPV from the first election as a sovereign state (under the Crown) in 1932 to the Great Financial Crisis, with the Labour Party winning much of the remainder. Fianna Fáil, the populist cipher, were the natural party of government, and were often able to form majority governments without the help of opposition members — no small feat under PR. The remaining one-third of the time, Ireland was governed by Fine Gael in coalition with Labour and others (and once under a Fine Gael majority). That the two main parties have been reduced to ruling in coalition shows how successful the Irish Left has been in the past twenty years.

Sinn Féin have lost 5.5 percentage points since the last election in February 2020. Given the poor showing of the nationalist Right (see below), most of this will have been lost to other parties on the Left, including the pro-life Aontú. But Sinn Féin will still remain by far the largest left-wing party in the Republic of Ireland. This is a situation they could have only dreamed of in 1997, when they won just 2.5% of the FPV and a single seat. Their vote has increased at every single election until Friday, aided by their abandonment of terrorism and by Ireland’s deep recession. Their core voter base is composed mostly of working-class people for whom the issue of Irish unity matters as much as economic issues. It also clearly skews younger than the population as a whole.

Sinn Féin’s strongest performing seats are in working-class West Dublin and in poorer rural counties like Donegal, where they had the two strongest performing candidates and won over 40% of the FPV. One trend I’ve noticed anecdotally, but not seen remarked upon in Irish media, is that their support — at least among the middle-class — is much more male than other left-wing parties. Sinn Féin associations at Irish universities have fewer women than their counterparts in the Greens, Social Democrats, or Labour. I suspect this is due to their militancy, as I’ve come across very few women who are apologists for the PIRA (let alone outright supporters), and ‘rebel’ culture is very male-coded.

Sinn Féin’s voters are more opposed to immigration than those of the two other major parties, so if immigration remains a salient issue they will be faced with the same dilemma as other centre-left parties in Europe: move Right on immigration, and risk losing your socially liberal supporters to other left-wing parties? Or remain Left, and risk losing your working-class supporters to the populist Right? I do not want to tempt fate, but it could be that the 2020 election turns out to be the high-water mark of support for Sinn Féin — soon, they may end up getting squeezed from both directions.

It’s been a disappointing election for ‘nationalist’ (in this context, anti-immigration) candidates. There has been no ‘populist surge’ as a consequence of Ireland’s unrest over the government’s plantation of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants. Unless we use the broadest sense of the term ‘populist’, and count Independent Ireland’s Michael Collins, there will not be a single anti-immigration MP, and nationalists will register less than 3% of the FPV. This is inexcusable in a PR system.

This is, however, not purely the fault of nationalist candidates. Nationalism’s strongest candidate, independent Councillor Malachy Steenson, has been prevented from a clear run at a seat in Dublin Central by the intervention of gangster Gerard ‘the Monk’ Hutch. ‘Gerry’ Hutch is the leader of the Hutch gang, the second most powerful crime family in Ireland, and loser of the famous Hutch-Kinahan feud, which has resulted in eighteen murders. Hutch himself had thirty convictions by the age of eighteen, and has made millions through bank robberies, jewellery heists, burglaries, fraud, and drug trafficking. He reinvested some of this money into his community in Dublin’s North Inner City (for example, by opening a boxing gym) and has been a local celebrity and ‘Robin Hood’ figure since the ’90s.

He decided to run for Parliament in Dublin Central this year, and won 3,098 FPVs to Malachy Steenson’s 1,602. Hutch’s support will have largely come from the same white working-class people that Steenson was relying upon to turn out for him. As a consequence, while Hutch (fortunately) failed to get elected, his intervention has has prevented Steenson from seriously challenging Labour for Dublin Central’s fourth seat.

This would be a farce if it wasn’t so tragic, and provides a cautionary tale for what I like to call the ‘Andrew Tate model’ of populism. Hutch has very few policies (other than, shockingly, more police) and no policy expertise. His appeal is based on bribery, and a conflation of politicians who are hated by ‘the establishment’ because of what they believe (i.e., nationalists) with politicians who are hated by ‘the establishment’ because of their criminality (i.e., Hutch, Tate, Escobar, etc.). His election has redirected populist energy away from real nationalists and towards a non-ideological dead-end. Worse than this, it risks tarnishing populism with criminal grifters and Latin American-style politics. (See also: the brief infatuation of the Irish and international Right with the thug Conor McGregor.) Andrew and Tristan Tate have mooted running for Parliament in Luton, where they would be competing for the same set of ‘disgruntled’ voters as Reform. It would be catastrophic for the Right in Britain if it allowed populism to be redirected from immigration to confrontation with the establishment for its own sake…

One of the most interesting independents was Nick Delehanty, a candidate who ran on the slogans ‘control immigration’ and ‘make crime illegal’. Sounds familiar enough. But he is no ordinary populist insurgent: Nick (this time, 35 ans) is a solicitor who works in asset management and attended the same Jesuit boarding school as James Joyce. Reading his X account (@nick_delahanty) reveals him to be a Lee Kuan Yew-inspired ‘neoliberal’ who recites familiar (for Pimlico Journal readers) talking points about building prisons, deregulating planning, and cutting immigration. Unfortunately, the elite human capital in Dublin Bay South — a mixture of privately-renting young professionals and TCD Class of ’82 graduates in homes now worth over a million euros — gave him just 4% of the FPV.

There was, however, at least some good news for nationalists, however small. The combined FPV of all nationalists (including Delehanty) was up to 60,586. This amounts to 2.7% of the FPV: a big improvement on 2020, when the same figure was so small that no-one even bothered to count it. Nationalism’s strongest constituency was Dublin North-West, where nationalist candidates won 9.7% of the FPV. Despite this improvement, the nationalist Right was not able to convert its support into even a single seat, despite the lack of FPTP. This was for two main reasons: first, because of its extreme factionalism; and second, because of the lack of a single identifiable personality.

The first of these two problems is inevitable in the early stages of any nationalist movement, as different factions compete to see who becomes the dominant nationalist party, like National Rally in France or the AfD in Germany. We should hope that the party that is able to triumph among the nationalist fringe is also the party best able to sell nationalism to the broader electorate. We must, however, also emphasise that there is no guarantee that this will be the case. Moreover, there is (unfortunately) no suitable party for this purpose at present. The two largest nationalist parties are the pro-‘Irexit’ Irish Freedom Party and the ‘third-positionist’ National Party. From Ireland’s perspective, ‘Irexit’ is a silly, toxic idea which will destroy Ireland’s economy, and which (as all British readers will know) comes with no guarantee of immigration reductions. The National Party has all the issues one would expect, and is haunted by the fascist cosplay splinter group Clann Éireann.

As for the second of these two problems, the best candidates for a Farage- or Le Pen-type figure who can overperform in a particular constituency are Ted Neville or Yan Mac Oireataigh of the National Party, and the aforementioned independent Nick Delehanty. Ted Neville is getting on a bit — he has been an anti-immigration activist for twenty years. Nick Delahanty is limited in his ability to propel others to Parliament because he is an independent, and (in many ways for the better) doesn’t share an ideology with the harder elements of the Right. Yan Mac Oireataigh is just twenty-two years old: a bit too fresh-faced, at least for now.

Whichever party under whichever figurehead the Irish nationalists unite under, things need to start moving — quickly — or resisting what is being imposed upon the Irish people will become much, much harder.

—Anonymous Contributor, Pimlico Journal

Senior Tories flash ankles on immigration: Kemi Badenoch & Chris Philp’s press conference at the Centre for Policy Studies

Cor.

Kemi Badenoch has finally graced us with a speech, not on values (undefined) but on policy (also, as it happens, mostly undefined). You can read a full transcript of Badenoch’s speech here.