BEING attached to declining Britain carries many penalties for the north: no, or slow income growth, growing child poverty, lack of investment, poor infrastructure, declining value of welfare benefits, to name but a few.

There’s also the centralised nature of UK government, with handouts from the Treasury like the one doled out last week.

The north has no agency in its own prosperity because unionists refuse to exercise self-determination.

The north can’t elect a government or play any role in one, so people here have no say in how this sub-polity is run. Stormont just doles out what’s doled out.

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The Resolution Foundation, an economic think tank, notes that the British economy hasn’t been growing and isn’t growing (0.1% in the last two quarters), and reckons that average UK incomes will rise by only 0.3% per annum until 2029-30.

Low-income families will be worst affected, as they have been since the mid-2000s. Incomes here are below the UK average, as they always have been.

The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) found last year that Britain’s poorest 10% of households are worse off than the poorest in Slovenia and Malta, confirming a study by the Financial Times two years earlier.

People in Britain might have more cash, but the cost of living is higher.

Benefits in the UK are the least generous compared to similar countries in the EU and in many respects are the lowest in Europe.

NIESR says that welfare payments in the UK have been below the cost of household essentials for 12 of the 14 years from 2011-25, except for the boost during Covid.

Starmer’s government is looking at ways to reduce benefit expenditure, having been rebuffed by Labour MPs last year.

It’s all exacerbated by the idiocy of the DUP, which retards society here.

They dogmatically insist against all evidence on continuing with a discredited education system that fails the majority.

It produces an unacceptable percentage of early school leavers with few or no qualifications. It gives the north an inordinate number of teenagers not in education employment or training (NEETS).

Instead of always reflexively comparing the north with ‘the rest of the UK’, wherever that is, as the yardstick, try looking south.

The south has five technical universities. We have none. In the south over 52% of people aged 25-64 have a first degree or higher.

In 2024, 55.6% of graduates were women. Research shows the fastest way to transform society is to educate women.

It’s not only in education where DUP idiocy is manifest. Last week Alliance minister Andrew Muir protested that the DUP’s opposition to an independent environmental protection agency (unlike everywhere else in these islands) is “without rhyme or reason”.

Like so many other of their stupidities, it has nothing to do with science, facts, economic necessity.

You’ll notice the facts and figures cited here primarily indicate the effects of spending decisions and policies on the lives of the poorest, least qualified or skilled and least educated here.

The unspoken truth is that in the north, the middle class fare quite well thank you very much. Housing is cheaper than in Britain or the Republic. Professional salaries are more or less at parity with those in Britain, but the cost of living is less here.

The grammar system the DUP insists on suits the middle class. No need to talk about the scandalous health provision here when anyone who can afford it goes private. Guess who that suits?

The saying is that when the Troubles broke out, the unionist middle class fled politics and went to the golf course until it was over.

It’s over, but they never came back. They gave political unionism to the DUP, exposing it to ridicule.

Before the 1970s there were factory owners, businessmen, professionals, landowners representing unionism at Stormont and in councils. Where are they today?

Certainly not in politics. There’s no percentage in it. They know they’d have no agency. They couldn’t control anything, unlike in pre-1972 Stormont. The NIO runs the place.

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So why waste valuable time getting down and dirty debating DUP culture wars? Instead, they deal with agencies (which do have agency) like Invest NI, or the Strategic Investment Board, bypassing what passes for politics in the assembly.

The DUP’s addiction to the past, their determination to block all progress and anything progressive, especially if proposed by Sinn Féin, does more than exasperate the other parties.

Their sheer bloody mindedness, the stand-offs they cause (like the Maze development), ensure a worse standard of living here for the poorest in society.

Remaining shackled to the decomposing corpse of post-imperial Britain keeps everyone worse off, but thanks to the DUP the poorest in society here are worse off than they should be, even by low British standards.

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