Prime Minister’s Questions, 11th March 2009

Three topics interested me:

There was a lot of talk about the renewed violence in Northern Ireland with a unanimous support for unity among the leaders of Northern Ireland, as if unity could be willed into unilateral existence. This ignores the fact that the problem of republican extremism lies in the unreconstructed politics and creation myths of the Irish Republic. These in turn depend upon the legacy of the extreme policies of Eamonn De Valera which have never been examined or scrutinised in any meaningful way. What the “Real” or “Continuity” IRA are doing to Martin McGuiness and Gerry Adams is what de Valera did to Michael Collins. The pattern will repeat itself until the original thesis is challenged and faced down within the Irish Republic. Blatherings from Peter Hain about encouraging unity are meaningless in this context.

In reply to a question from Labour’s Andrew Miller the Prime Minister referred to a “car summit” which presumably means we are going to attempt to revive the “big car economy” despite the opportunity to use the downturn to reconstruct our harmful dependence on the internal combustion engine.

Conservative Nicolas Winterton raised the inflationary consequences of “quantitative easing” (printing money). In reply the Prime Minister said “we have kept inflation low in this country” – this is not true as inflation was kept low by artificially cheap Chinese imports and the true rate of inflation was demonstrated by the explosion of prices in the housing market. Quantitative easing must lead to hyper-inflation as whichever politician attempts to turn off the tap will lose the subsequent election (and so the tap will never be turned off until the system collapses again – you can see this coming!).