An easy one to start: hands up if you remember Tony Blair? Of course you do. How could you forget his smile, his “Well, you know” and “Here’s the thing”, the spontaneity of his remark about not wanting to engage in soundbites even as he declared that the hand of history was on his shoulder. Say what you like about Tony, he did a good job in helping forge the Good Friday Agreement.
But then in the Noughties it all went bloopy. Tony decided he had to act as deputy to big sheriff George W Bush, and he sent British troops to help invade Iraq. His reason? Because it contained weapons of mass destruction that could arrive over London within forty-five minutes. Later, after tens of thousands of innocent people had shed their life blood in Iraq, it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction. Tony had been wrongly advised.
So here’s the thing you need to remember: the invasion and all that bloodshed wasn’t Tony’s fault. It was his advisers’ fault. Yes, millions of people were sufficiently persuaded that the WMD cache tale was a load of old hooey that they took to the streets and urged Tony to do the right thing. But Tony did the wrong thing and went in. But again I emphasise: it wasn’t his fault. It was his advisers’ fault.
We see the public making the same mistake today, right here in our NE state. Yes, Arlene Foster was the Minister who initiated the Cash-for-Ash scheme. Yes, another DUP Minister, Jonathan Bell, carried on where Arlene left off. So the temptation is to say “What the truckduck – Arlene and Jonathan have started and maintained a scheme that’s going to cost us all nearly £500million! They were the Ministers, they ran it, they are to blame!”
But that’s where you’d be wrong. Because Arlene and Tom were acting on the best advice they got. Like Tony Blair, they were fed misleading and even false information. So like everyone else Arlene and Jonathan feel gutted about the cost of this thing, and it’s not their fault. It’s the fault of the people who gave them bad advice.
And don’t try any of your sleekit little Provo manoeuvres about saying Arlene can step aside for a number of weeks while the case is investigated, but is refusing to do so because she’s arrogant and listens to no one. She does listen. She’s listened to her advisers. That’s why she’s decided not to let herself be humiliated by Sinn Féin. Ultimately, it’s the advisers who are going to bring down Stormont, not Arlene.
Tony and Arlene: two good people led astray by bad advice.
The British Irish sneer about every utterance from Sinn Féin having to be cleared by Connolly House yet the DUP are totally in sway of their SPADs and the men in grey suits and who knows what else.
“the DUP are totally in sway of their SPADs and the men in grey suits and who knows what else.”
It is that who knows what else that an investigation needs to find out fiosrach.
Arlene has already hinted that Peter Robinson had a hand in this.
He was first minister at the time and it would be hard to believe he didn’t have an input.
We know from the appointment of Ms Emma Pengilly to the ire of Ruth Patterson that Peter appears to have been under the influence of Mr Little for saving him from jail time during their joint gun running adventures with Ulster Resistance.
It will be interesting to see what connections there are to Mr little or loyalist paramilitaries among the applications spike during the scheme closure delay period initiated against the wishes of the minister in charge by the DUP leadership.
Also what businesses benefitted from loans for the scheme from the banks which Arlene personally wrote to guaranteeing those ludicrous profit margins would be returned. It is imperative that the public know the answers to these.
If the preliminary report does not report on this then a full public enquiry may well be required – but there has to be a fact based report on this over the coming months. There will be no escaping this truth coming out
Well here’s the thing Jude, common sense would dictate that if Arlene believed it was all her advisers fault why would she continue to shoulder the blame for them?
Why would Arlene continue to have her name besmirched for being incompetent if she could at the stroke of a pen dismiss her advisors and replace them with ones with intelligence?
Call me a cynic but I think there is culpability all round and Arlene couldn’t dismiss her advisors lest she had a new traunch of little Jonathon Bells running around telling all the world their version of why it wasn’t their fault and who was really to blame.
She hasn’t pointis, she has blamed just about everyone else and claimed she feels that she has done no wrong.
The very reason she wont step aside is because she doesn’t think she has done anything wrong and the DUP party therefore agree with her.
She has hinted that Peter had a hand in the initial decision not to follow the UK model, and claimed he was her boss at the time it went through, she has blamed the civil servants for not acting on the whistle blowers claims that it was flawed which she passed on and heard nothing about afterwards apparently, backed up by the PAC who confirmed passing on an email and doing bugger all about it afterwards was perfectly ok, by stormont standards I assume.
The letters to the bank indicating that the RHI scheme was glaringly lucrative but would be guaranteed show that she was aware that the scheme was flawed and this was to ensure banks didn’t think it was simply too good to be true.
In fact, here they went wrong was the amount they exceeded the londons part of the payments.
I am guessing that applicants have spread the word and the steep spike in applications will have an inordinate number with links to the DUP.
Had the claims value remained within the London budget and not impacted the block grant, who would have cared really?
This looks like a DUP money spinner at dishing out the wealth that went horribly wrong to me.
Jessica,
‘The very reason she wont step aside is because she doesn’t think she has done anything wrong and the DUP party therefore agree with her”.
Arlene may believe that she has not done anything wrong like Tony Blair who claimed that he may have acted in error but that “because he ‘believed’ he was doing the right thing that this in his mind absolved him from responsibility for his actions.
Like a lot of others in the DUP their beliefs are a quamtam shift from the rest of us living in the real world!
I would also not be so certain that the DUP agree that she is blameless. The DUP will currently be hedging their bets between minimising damage to the party while supporting her or if they believe the critical threshold has been reached whereby she is haemoraging support to the UUP or others then she will receive a late night visit by the tall men in long dark coats and she will quietly step into the shadows.
In my view it is a close call and DUP will already have devised a plan to jettison Arlene to protect their powerful sponsors who would prefer to remain outside public scrutiny!
I agree and I think calling an election before this has got to the point where an investigation has reported to the public would be a fatal error.
I would be scundered if Sinn Fein as the only party I want to lead a new Ireland behaved in this way. In fact I would give up completely and become as pessimistic as billy if that happened.
There can be no avoiding the scrutiny of an investigation worthy of restoring the confidence that has been lost over the DUPs handling of this.
Even MT has found it difficult to defend and has been trying desperately to find other topics to apply his torturous derogatory remarks upon.
The longer this drags on, the more pressure will mount on the DUP, the more london will lose interest in the north, the more they will involve and look to Dublin and the more the unionist electorate will have to question the sanity in supporting an arrogant DUP failing them to save their own skins.
I would be interested to see how they handle weeks of this pressure mounting upon them.
They fouled the ball and are now seeking to change the rules of the game or throw the match to avoid facing the penalty.
“The longer this drags on, the more pressure will mount on the DUP, the more london will lose interest in the north, the more they will involve and look to Dublin ”
It is certainly interesting that the greatest threat to Northern Ireland’s place in the UK has come from those who protested the most that they would save Ulster.
Save Ulster from what?
Ulster is Irish, it does not belong to the UK.
Our future will always be with the rest of Ireland.
To get the best possible relationship with Britain, you will have to work with republicans who have been willing to do so and also with Dublin which will be more important to London than ever before.
Rejecting everything Irish is hardly going to do you any favours in the long run.
“Save Ulster from what?”
It was a turn of phrase, Jessica. One used once. I’ll not go into the details but you can google it.
The point I was making was the irony one – the greatest threat to the UK Union are the unionists who protest the loudest and who promised great security for the constitutional position of NI.
Perhaps we should start a Destroyed the Union Party?
I hadn’t realised Arlene and Jonathan had such an intimate relationship as you seem to think!
Probably the most celebrated doler-out of advice in literature, Esteemed Blogmeister, was Polonius, the original self-appointed Spindoctor in Hamlet.
Shakespeare clearly intended him to be taken as a kind of Balonius as is evidenced by the advice he gives to his son, Laertes, on the latter’s embarking for college in France from the ill-gotten state of Denmark.
A precursor of Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ it reads like a litany with the trimmings, ALL the trimmings, comprising as it does of bromides dressed in their Sunday Best, from:
-Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar.
To
-Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.
To
-Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy
To
-But not expressed in fury; rich, not gaudy
For apparel oft proclaims the man.
To
-Neither a borrower nor a lender be.
To
-This above all: to thine ownself be true.
Where the sly eyes of The Great Shakes begin to twinkle is when, in the following act, he puts the following line into the long-winded mouth of The Polonius, the Prince of Tedium:
-Therefore since brevity is the soul of wit.
Funny that, how Tones and Arl the Snarl are a son (at one remove) and daughter of neighbouring counties: Donegal and Fermanagh. Might this go some way towards explaining their tendency to be, erm, Led Astray as they Erne ?
To conclude: Foster the Finger-wagger for the Arras, oops, the Aras !
ultimately,its the advisers who are going to bring down stormont.not arlene…as long as its brought down its little odds who does it as long as its gone.
Jude, I’d mentioned previously the role of our civil service in all this, if Arlene’s head is to roll in this, surely, from the public interest viewpoint, the senior civil servants should go too, and renounce their pension entitlements as the poor public will be funding this for decades.
As to Tony, he made his bed, he just forgot where he put it and is coming back to buy, with ten million sterling, another one, amaudaun is a good word for him.
It’s understandable that many do not realise that you have your satirist’s hat on at times and simply jump right in .I say it’s understandable because it has been my own experience at times . None of this is surprising given how ridiculous everything we have experienced her actually is. Here in Norneverland there is always someone else to blame . it’s part of the culture innit?We actually need someone o to look after us all because it’s obvious that we are not geared -up for joined-up thinking.We have a First minister who acts and behaves like an eight year old stamping her foot and crossing her arms across her chest. She’ll be threatening to hold her breath until she goes blue in the face next.
So who to blame ? Well the SPADS are seemingly very well paid for runnng the government and handing out beautiful advice. Where do they come from? Who ever told them they could advise us all on how to run our lives? If they were chosen by our ministers to give bad advice , whose judgement is at fault here? Come to that …if these advisors are so damned good , why are they not getting the First Minister’s salary and sitting in her chair…. and come to that again what exactly is a first Minister or a head of any department getting paid for at all if not to have the final sign-off and take the fall if it all goes wrong .It is a position where the buck finally stops and there’s no one left to blame but yourself .That’s what the wage is for..
paddy
Yes a jester’s hat would be a good idea. That way those of us unfamiliar with the sophisticated humour of the satirist (oh look a mentally ill person,isn’t he nutty ha ha) would know when to laugh.
Or alternatively write something funny! That might work.
Still onboard gio….good lad….
Indeed paddy.
It is the triumph of hope over experience.
These things are so complicated that no one caught them on, not the parliamentarians nor the scrutiny committees, never mind the ordinary people who protest in their tens of thousands or stand stunned. The size of the field may vary but the wolves have all the same nature. Look at Jeremy Corbyn and the hope he engendered within the labour party and politics generally; that has all evaporated now and people are left like sheep without a shepherd. The wolves are gathering.
( all )the parties knew for over a year what was going on.if nolan and the bbc hadnt exposed it .maybe thats why no public enquiry.
If the investigation isn’t up to scratch, there may well have to be a pubic inquiry.
It would be stupid to go straight for a public inquiry first and not at least try to get to the bottom if this with a quick well thought out investigation. It would take a year just to establish the terms of a public inquiry, that is just stupid.
If the DUP push it that far then I would be demanding a border poll over it and not accepting no from any SOS. Dublin will have to step in and back a poll to unite the country and close Stormont once and for all. The people should demand it.
peters investigation was never published this is the same.no reason a public enquiry cant run alongside this proposed cover up.what have they all to hide
“Ultimately, it’s the advisers who are going to bring down Stormont, not Arlene.”
I believe it was Old Bolshevik and Soviet Foreign Minister under Joseph Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, who once said “Advisors are very dangerous, I always double check every scrap of information they give me”.
Its not surprising to learn Stalin or Molotov mistrusted their advisors, given both had most of their advisors in every field from politics to the military wiped out when they came to power. Stalin’s massacre of all of Russia’s Field Marshal’s and numerous Generals was one major reason why Germany battered the Russians in the first year of the war, despite being outnumbered 10 to 1.
Its a pity Blair and Arlene didn’t have even a tiny bit of the mistrust of advisors that Stalin and Molotov had. Am I suggesting Blair and Arlene should have went Bolshevik and had their advisors massacred? No, obviously not but taking their advice led to hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq in Blair’s case. In Arlene’s case her advisors advice has left us all here in the North with a bill of half a billion pounds, that’s roughly a £270 bill for every man, woman and child in the North according to one source. All because of Arlene’s incompetence or cronyism or maybe both. Not to mention the possible incompetence or cronyism of her advisors, some of whom have relatives who are set to benefit from RHI.
So think of Arlene’s actions in this way: We will all be receiving a bill of over £270 in the post. That’s essentially what Arlene has done to everyone here, Unionist and Nationalist. This money may not come directly from our bank accounts but it will come from our Health Service, our Roads, our Education Department, etc. Yet Arlene STILL refuses to step down due to her arrogance and pride. In any other society Arlene’s political career would be ripped to shreds.
I’m not the biggest fan of the SDLP’s Colum Eastwood (any relation to Clint Eastwood?) but he recently said “An Election will dilute Arlene’s arrogance”. I’m becoming more and more convinced it will. Christmas 2017 might be coming early for MikeTV…..