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Louth For Ever ★ writing on 15-May-2026

Two votes in the Dáil on a single evening, and what they showed about the political form a counter-hegemonic project actually requires.

Photo by Dahlia E. Akhaine on Unsplash

Section I: The Wednesday

On Wednesday evening, 13 May 2026, the Dáil took two votes the political class on this island had been waiting for. The first was the Social Democrats’ Reproductive Rights (Amendment) Bill, which would have ended the mandatory three-day waiting period for women seeking terminations, widened the criteria for terminations in cases of fatal foetal abnormality, and ended the criminalisation of doctors providing the care. The bill was defeated by 85 votes to 30 with 36 abstentions. Every one of those 36 abstentions came from Sinn Féin. The second was a planning bill that the Green Party leadership has described as gutting the Climate Action Act, the legislation underpinning Ireland’s climate commitments. Sinn Féin voted with Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Independent Ireland, and Aontú in favour of the planning bill. The Social Democrats voted with them. Labour, the Greens, and People Before Profit voted against.

By Wednesday night, serious writers in the political readership were posting that they would wake up in a different Irish political landscape on Thursday morning. By Thursday morning, the parties whose positioning had been the subject of those posts were issuing graphics on Bluesky identifying which parties had voted to gut the Climate Act and which had voted to support the reproductive rights bill. Sinn Féin appeared on the wrong side of the first graphic and on the abstention side of the second. The Social Democrats appeared on the right side of the second and on the wrong side of the first. People Before Profit, the Greens, and Labour appeared on the right side of both.

Wednesday showed something the body of work this essay belongs to has been pointing at for several weeks without naming directly. Not which party did better. Not which party deserves the harsher censure. The political form a counter-hegemonic project against far-right consolidation actually requires does not exist in the current Irish party system. The constituencies that the project would need to assemble are distributed across multiple parties, none of which holds the full set of terrains the contest demands. Wednesday was the evening this became visible across two contests on a single sitting.

Section II: The hegemonic frame

Five years ago, certain things did not feel ordinary. The phrasings that show up now in pub conversations and family WhatsApp groups on immigration, on gender, on what kind of country this is supposed to be, were available then only to a small constituency that the rest of the political culture treated as marginal. They are no longer marginal. They have become, for a constituency that grows visibly every electoral cycle, ordinary. This shift is the most important political fact on these islands and it is the one mainstream commentary is least equipped to engage.

The shift is not random and it is not spontaneous. It is the visible surface of a hegemonic project. The project does not seek only to win elections. It seeks to become the framework through which the constituencies it claims to represent understand their political situation. It seeks to make itself feel like common sense. This is what hegemony means. When it succeeds, it does not look like victory. It looks like ordinary people stating what everyone now knows.

The project operates on integrated terrains. Anti-immigration nativism is one. Patriarchal restoration through opposition to reproductive rights, gender equality, and trans recognition is another. Anti-EU sentiment positioned as the recovery of sovereignty is a third. The colonisation of working-class economic grievance through narratives that locate responsibility in external enemies rather than in structural failures is the fourth. None of these terrains is independent. They are aspects of a single coherent worldview that hangs together as an account of how the world works and what is wrong with it. When Reform UK voters cast their ballots in the English local elections last week, they were not protesting against Conservative or Labour failure. They were voting for an integrated worldview that explains why those failures happened and what would put things right.

This is the political sphere. The far right is consolidating on this terrain through electoral organisation, party formation, parliamentary alignment, and the recruitment of established political figures into its project. The DUP-Reform franchise relationship is one form of this consolidation. The blockades of April 2026 were another. The TUV’s alignment with Reform was a third. The political sphere is where the contest looks most like what political analysis is used to engaging. Most political analysis stays here. And then loses.

The ideological sphere is where the contest is actually decided. The ideological sphere is the cultural production, the everyday discourse, the assumptions that feel like common sense rather than like political positions. The far right’s project on these islands has been building on this terrain for far longer than its electoral breakthrough suggests. The WhatsApp groups. The international amplifiers. The cultural production around national identity in podcast and social-media space. The gradual rewriting of what it has become acceptable to say. None of this is visible in vote tallies. All of it shows up in the slow movement of the Overton window, in the conversations that have changed, in the phrasings that no longer feel marginal.

A counter-hegemonic project must contest both spheres. It must hold the integrated terrain on its own terms. Reproductive rights, climate, migrant rights, economic justice, EU realignment, gender equality, trans healthcare, constitutional change. These must hang together as aspects of a coherent alternative worldview, not as separate issues to be picked up or set down according to electoral convenience. The far right does not pick terrains. It cannot afford to. The project holds the terrain together or it forfeits the framework. And the framework is what is actually being contested.

Section III: What Wednesday showed

The two votes in the Dáil on Wednesday evening produced a specific empirical picture of where the existing Irish opposition stands against the requirement the previous section named. The picture is not what most contemporary commentary on the votes has captured. Most of the commentary has read the votes as a Sinn Féin failure on reproductive rights or as a Social Democrats failure on climate. Read in the framework Section II established, they show something different and more structural.

On reproductive rights, the parties holding the terrain were the Social Democrats, Labour, the Greens, and People Before Profit. Sinn Féin abstained. The Coalition parties and Independent Ireland opposed. On the climate question, the parties holding the terrain were Labour, the Greens, and People Before Profit. Sinn Féin and the Social Democrats voted with the Coalition parties and Independent Ireland on the side the Greens describe as gutting the Climate Action Act. The two alignments do not match. Sinn Féin abstained on one terrain and voted with the Coalition on the other. The Social Democrats are on the right side of one terrain and the wrong side of the other. Labour, the Greens, and People Before Profit are on the right side of both, but they are also the three smallest opposition formations and the constituencies they currently mobilise are insufficient to be the political form a counter-hegemonic project would actually require.

The Green Party leader and former Cabinet minister Roderic O’Gorman named the structural fact within hours of the vote. It was “disappointing to see the Social Democrats and Sinn Féin ally with the Government to undermine the Climate Act”, he wrote. “It is astonishing that parties of the left would endorse a Bill which undermines the very Climate Action Act they had supported only five years ago.” The framing is precise. Parties of the left, supporting a Bill of this kind, against a Bill of that kind, five years apart on the same legislation. The structural fact O’Gorman names is the same fact the voting alignments demonstrate. The parties categorised as the Irish left did not hold the climate terrain that the categorisation implies.

This is the structural misalignment in the Irish opposition. The contests do not line up. Sinn Féin abstained on reproductive rights and then voted with the Coalition on the climate bill, compromised on both. The Social Democrats brought the reproductive rights bill but voted with the Coalition on climate too – clean on the first terrain, compromised on the second. Only Labour, the Greens, and People Before Profit held both lines, and none of them holds the scale. The structural fact this produces is that no existing opposition party in the Republic currently holds the full set of terrains the framework requires.

Wednesday made this visible in a single evening on two consecutive votes. The visibility is the political consequence the readership noticed. The structure was there before Wednesday. Wednesday was the evening it became impossible to miss.

The misalignment is the specific obstacle a counter-hegemonic project faces in Ireland that the far right’s project does not face on the same terrain. Reform UK does not have a Sinn Féin problem or a Social Democrats problem. Its terrains are integrated by design. The opposition’s terrains are distributed across multiple parties by historical contingency, the accumulated effect of how different parties have positioned themselves through successive Irish political moments. The framework Section II established as the requirement is not currently available to be held by any single political form in the existing opposition. The form that could hold it does not yet exist.

This is the structural fact the rest of the essay engages. Sinn Féin’s abstention on Wednesday is one symptom. The Social Democrats’ climate vote is another. The misalignment is the structural condition both symptoms reveal. The framework is what is being contested, and the form capable of holding the framework is what has yet to be built.

Section IV: The party the tradition is asking about

Five essays have built the body of work this one extends. The trilogy diagnosed how the leadership of one party absorbs structural critique through procedural framing. The fourth essay engaged whether political forms exist to carry the grievance the moment is producing. The fifth essay engaged the constitutional moment the May 2026 British elections produced. The sequence has been pointing at a question without naming it. Serious thinkers within the tradition that have engaged republicanism critically from inside the movement are now naming it.

Setting aside how Sinn Féin reached its present position, what can the party offer in future against far-right consolidation and the contest for hegemony in both political and ideological spheres? The question is forward-looking and structural. The body of work has been earning the right to answer it.

The answer has to be honest. Sinn Féin can offer real things. The largest opposition parliamentary presence in the Republic. A 32-county institutional architecture no other party on the island has built. An organised electoral machine that has converted political momentum into representation faster than any opposition formation in recent Irish history. Constitutional discipline rooted in a tradition that has spent a century working out what self-determination actually requires. These are not nothing. They are the structural reasons the question is being asked of Sinn Féin rather than of any other party in the Republic.

What the party cannot currently offer is the structural capacity to hold integrated terrain. The trilogy diagnosed the absorption pattern under cost-of-living pressure. The fourth essay diagnosed it under the pressure of recognising gendered grievance. Wednesday’s abortion abstention is the latest instance. David Cullinane’s stated reasons, concerns about the fatal foetal abnormality definition, concerns about the decriminalisation provisions, the existence of a separately tabled bill, are not invented. They are the procedural framing the pattern produces every time the substantive question is hard. The pattern is not contingent on the issue. The issue changes. The pattern does not.

This is the structural reading the body of work has built. The absorption pattern is constitutive of how the party operates. It is not a series of separate tactical decisions. It is the visible operation of a structural feature. The feature is the party’s relationship to the question of what it is willing to contest substantively versus what it is willing to absorb procedurally. On the terrains where the substantive question has been put to the leadership over the past month, cost of living, gendered grievance, reproductive rights, the answer has been procedural absorption. There is no reason to expect the next terrain to produce a different answer.

The answer to the tradition’s question therefore has to be precise. Sinn Féin can offer scale, constitutional discipline, and 32-county presence. It cannot offer the capacity to hold integrated terrain on the framework the contest requires. A counter-hegemonic project that requires both will find part of what it needs in Sinn Féin. The rest will have to come from somewhere the party in its current form is not.

Section V: What would have to be built

On Wednesday night, the writer Philip O’Connor posted on Bluesky that he would wake up on Thursday morning in a different Irish political landscape, that any idea of Irish left unity had been killed stone dead by Sinn Féin’s abstention, and that the lines would have to be redrawn and something new built without them. The Dublin Bay North Greens posted that it was pretty lame for Sinn Féin and the Social Democrats to ape Coalition populist posturing, and that the two votes together explained why so many people thought politicians were all the same. The Social Democrats themselves posted that they would fight on, because the women of Ireland deserve better.

These are not the same response and they are not coming from the same political tradition. What they share is a recognition that what is required now cannot be supplied by the existing party formations in the form those formations currently hold. The recognition is being articulated, in different vocabularies, by writers and party voices in real time. The propositional task is being named, in public, by people who would until very recently have located their politics inside one or another of the existing opposition projects.

This essay does not propose its own version of what should be built. The structural work it has tried to do is upstream of the propositional question. What it can name is what the body of work has been earning the right to name. The framework, a counter-hegemonic project against far-right consolidation requires is integrated terrain held by a coherent political form. The terrain runs across reproductive rights, climate, migrant rights, economic justice, EU realignment, gender equality, trans healthcare, and constitutional change. The form capable of holding all of it does not currently exist in the Irish party system. The constituencies that would assemble inside such a form are distributed across multiple existing parties. The misaligned divisions that run through the opposition are structural rather than accidental. Wednesday made them visible. They were there before Wednesday and they will be there next week.

The work of building the form is what the political moment is now asking of everyone. It is not work that can be done from outside the parties or from inside any single one of them. It is work that requires conversations the existing party structures have not yet had with each other or with the constituencies they each represent. The writers who have begun to name the task in public this week are doing one part of that work. The voters who are now publicly reconsidering their party loyalties are doing another. The institutional voices of the existing parties are doing a third part of it, whether they intend to or not, by demonstrating in real time what their current forms cannot hold. The framework is what is being contested. The form capable of holding it is what has yet to be built. What is built from here is the next chapter.

References

Primary commentary engaged in this essay

O’Gorman, Roderic. Statement on Bluesky, 14 May 2026, on the Climate Action Act vote. Posted with the Green Party graphic identifying parties that voted to gut the Climate Act.

O’Connor, Philip. Statement on Bluesky, 13 May 2026, on Sinn Féin’s abortion abstention and the implications for Irish left unity.

Cullinane, David. Statement on the Sinn Féin position on the Social Democrats’ Reproductive Rights (Amendment) Bill, Dáil Éireann, 13 May 2026. Reported across RTÉ News, The Irish Times, and The Journal.

Dublin Bay North Greens. Statement on Bluesky, 14 May 2026, on the abortion and climate votes.

Social Democrats. Statement on Bluesky, 13 May 2026, We fight on. Because the women of Ireland deserve better.

Empirical sources

Dáil Éireann. Reproductive Rights (Amendment) Bill 2026, defeated by 85 votes to 30 with 36 abstentions, 13 May 2026.

Dáil Éireann. Planning legislation vote, 13 May 2026, described by the Green Party as gutting the Climate Action Act.

Voting alignment data for both votes drawn from RTÉ News, The Irish Times, The Journal, and the Green Party graphic on Bluesky.

Companion essays in this sequence

The Blockade Is the Message: A first note on the weekend the blockade ended. Published April 2026. Republished on The Pensive Quill.

The Money Is Not There: A second note on the weekend the blockade ended. Published April 2026. Republished on The Pensive Quill.

What Would Have to Be Built: A third and propositional note on the weekend the blockade ended. Published 20 April 2026.

The Tools of Their Livelihoods: A fourth note on the questions the political moment is asking. Published 5 May 2026.

The Franchise: A note from a moment when the political ground in Britain shifted. Published 9 May 2026.

⏩Louth For Ever writes on Irish politics and constitutional change. Follow for analysis of Ireland’s democratic future as it’s constructed by those actually engaged in the work.

No Form To Hold It

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Twelve

 

Hate Theology @ 4

 

A Morning Thought @ 3185

Gary Robertson ⚽ Rumours of rumours and talk of talks but little of substance this week from Celtic FC. 

While The Rangers are busying themselves in the transfer market, strengthening their squad, across the city other than contract extensions for a couple of players, most of the talk continues to be of players leaving. Engels, Maeda and Nygren are all taking the eye of clubs south of the border with no talk of replacements.
 
One move in the SPL that wasn’t a huge surprise was that of prolific scorer Barney Stewart getting a move from Falkirk to West Brom in England. He was a player I rather hoped Celtic would make a move for but he’s off to the Championship to try his luck there. I wish him well and hope one day I’ll see him in the hoops of Celtic. He’s a natural finisher, great with his feet, can score with his head and always seemed to get himself into plenty of scoring positions. We could have, and have done, much worse.
 
Other news: and the SPFL fixture lists have been announced.
 
The season (officially) kicks off on Friday July the 31st as The Rangers under new manager Derek McInnes travel to Dundee to face United at Tannadice. This match kicks off at 8pm and is available on Sky as are, for the first time in history all SPL matches. Over the course of four days every match will be shown from the opening weekend of the Scottish Premiership.
 
Celtic will have to wait till Monday 3rd of August for an 8pm kick off against Dundee. A fine way to wrap up a weekend's sport.
 
The Championship, Leagues One and Two all commence battle on Saturday August 1st with a full programme of fixtures with the first televised match from the Championship being Livingstons away trip to Partick Thistle on Friday 7th at 7-30pm to be shown on BBC Alba.

The first Glasgow Derby this year will be on September 20th as Celtic host Rangers in a midday kick off that again will be shown live on Sky. One for the notebook.
 
Before this however and domestically The Premier Sports cup returns in July with matches being shown on both 11th and 15th via Premier sports /Premier sports player.
 
Before all of this, however, Celtic travel to Tolka Park in a friendly with Shelbourne. A 6pm kick off on a fine July 7th evening. Shelbourne who recently managed to steal a point against Drogheda United after it looked like the Drogs would hold on for all three. I’m sure you’ll be reading about this in the coming days.
 
A team that shows character and commitment will surely pose a threat for Celtic and an excellent starting point for O’Neill's men.
 
Further down the line Celtic travel to Lisbon on 14th of July before a friendly against AC Milan on the 25th.
 
There’s much to look forward too and as the minutes, hours and days pass to kick off so the nerves will build.
 
Every fan believes this will be their year and that’s what keeps us going.
 
Football there’s nothing like it. 

Til next time ….

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

Fitba Fever

Joanne Murphy ★ Writing In International Leadership Association.

In the end he was miles ahead. Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, is now Member of Parliament for Makerfield in what had been billed as the most consequential UK byelection of all time. 

Burnham is a long stalwart of British Labour politics. A former cabinet minister and Blairite, he withdrew from the national stage 10 years ago, disillusioned and defeated in his campaign for the Labour leadership. Since then, he has remade himself as a local leader — taking on a new mayoralty, placing himself at the center of debates about the UK’s unbalanced regions, and earning himself the Game of Thrones-esque moniker “King of the North.” This political evolution has not come without consequences for the Labour establishment. Burnham gradually became a clear and present danger to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who consistently spiked his attempts to return to Westminster and had his people brief against him.

There is no love lost between the men. But the Labour Party’s catastrophic defeat in last month’s local elections meant that Starmer’s ability to stave off Burnham suddenly ran out of road. When a local MP fell on his sword to create a byelection, Burnham’s candidacy could no longer be denied.

Continue @ ILA.

Popularity, Popularism And Revolving Doors At 10 Downing Street

Barry Gilheany ✍ Writing this in wake of Andy Burnham’s convincing victory in the Makerfield by-election . . . 

. . . which in the opinion of politics observers and of his supporter may well presage his entry into 10 Downing Street, either by acclaim in a coronation or in a Labour Party leadership contest with the incumbent PM Sir Keir Starmer with all the potential for a typically Labour fratricidal struggle that comes with such terrain, I find the subject of this article, namely the involvement of outsourcing companies with the accommodation of asylum seekers. For tackling the extent of and the hollowing out of the British state to the outsourcing sector will have to be high on Burnham’s agenda for change; to rebalance the relationship between the state and the citizen and to roll back, in his words, “the failed forty-year neoliberal experiment.” Doing this will hopefully help to lance the boil of resentment and perceived sense of injustice around the housing of migrants.

For, arguably the biggest driver of anger around immigration and hostility towards, in particular, recently arrived migrant and/or asylum-seeking communities is the effect on local housing stock. Toxic narratives are ten a penny about the alleged provision of full board, lodging, and welfare benefits to young men of “fighting age” from “alien cultures" in hotels and Houses of Multiple Occupancy (HMOs) in areas of deprivation where there acute shortages of affordable housing. 

The last three summers have seen demonstrations about the accommodation of asylum seekers in these sites and also in disused military barracks; some protestors have genuine concerns about the integration of these new arrivistes in their communities and of the sheer ennui of the conditions of their temporary residence. For others, the motivations are xenophobic and racist as is shown by the presence of far-right agitators such as Tommy Robinson other groups further to his right such as Britain First, the white supremacist Homeland Party and the neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative. And, unfortunately, riots have been sparked by the convictions of asylum seekers for crimes, such as the murder of a hotel worker by a Sudanese national in Walsall in the West Midlands in October 2024 and the sexual assault of a 14 year-old girl in Epping by an Afghan national resident in the Bell Hotel three in 2025 and by events such as the attempted murder of a Belfast man by a Sudanese national captured in such horrific social media images a fortnight ago, and the Southport killings in August 2024. These disturbances, or pogroms, have of course been exacerbated by bad actors online who through their wilful dissemination of misinformation have sought to pour accelerant on the flames. Because lies and wilful ignorance has so often been the currency of debate over immigration and asylum, it is the aim of this article to shed some factual light on exactly how asylum seekers and migrants are housed. I aim to show the outsourcing of the running of asylum accommodation to private facilities companies such as Serco is a metaphor for the hollowing out of the British state; for the stark reality that, in the words of Anoosh Chakelian in her New Statesman article on the political temperature in the Greater Manchester satellite town of Wigan in the context of the Makerfield by-lection, the state has neither the capacity nor the political capital to build, buy or rent out specific asylum housing itself, and nor do councils. For her, the Home Office has been a “basket case,” that in the words of insiders with knowledge of the issue, “doesn’t know what to do” about the failing accommodation system and “isn’t doing anything about it,” despite all the official clamour about wishing to close the hotels.[1]

In her tour of the Makerfield constituency and especially Wigan its biggest town, Chakelian points to Darlington Street, a long road of redbrick terraces to house the major battalions of industrial England, mill worker, and miners, leading into Wigan town centre, as an archetypal symbol of Britain’s woes. For Darlington Street and its offshoots are believed locally to have Britain’s highest concentration of Serco run and other HMOs (Houses of Multiple Accommodation) Serco is one of the private outsourcing companies with a government contract to rent them out to asylum seekers. Serco leases houses from private landlords and runs them on their behalf. Chakelian reports being told that some landlords receive between £1,000 and £2,000 a month in rent on these properties, depending on number of bedrooms, location, and condition. This money comes from the Home Office, which agreed ten-year contracts to outsource the accommodation of asylum seekers in hotels and houses to Serco and two other firms: Clearsprings and Mears.[2]

The statistics tell the story of a very dysfunctional set up. There are 93,653 asylum seekers housed in Home Office asylum accommodation in the UK, around 22 per cent of whom are in hotels, some of which Serco runs. The hotels coast around £170 a night per person, compared with £14 per night on average in an HMO. Since closing the hotels is a priority for the government due to their roles as flashpoints for local discontent, the number of dispersals to houses has quietly risen annually – there are now 68,719 in tens of thousands of houses across the country. But with the number of irregular arrivals, 43,806 in the year ending March 2026, this number will continue to swell. A typical Serco HMO contract offers a seven-year lease with a one-year break [3] clause, and includes “monthly property inspections, council tax and utilities paid,” “no call-out payments to contractors,” no management, legal restriction, or set-up fees, and “day-to-day maintenance and repairs undertaken at no cost to the landlord.” The landlord is responsible for structural repairs and fundamentals such as pipework. No wonder, one landlord with HMOs in Norfolk has described Serco as “the fairy godmother.”[4]

On top of this, some property investors are buying up cheap properties, contracting them with Serco then advertising them to cash buyers as attractive investment opportunities with guaranteed steady rent. Anoosh Chakelian cites one property investor promising as high as 10.5 per cent returns on cheap housing for as little as £148,600. Landlords have also added to the perception of migrants being prioritised for housing by kicking out existing tenants (before the recent prohibition of no-fault evictions) in order to rent to Serco instead. All of this forms part of the picture portrayed by the Wigan MP and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy to Anoosh Chakelian while out door knocking for the eventually victorious Andy Burnham, “you’re often on a road where every other house been taken up as an HMO” – for asylum seekers, as well as for other housing schemes for ex-offenders, drug addicts and the homeless. “Because the properties are cheaper, they all target the same areas,” Nandy says, which drives up rents. According to her, her constituents now feel part of “a very transient community,” where they don’t know their neighbours, new people keep arriving, “and a lot of social problems [are] concentrated in one area.”[5].

That one vignette speaks to the progressive degradation of public and community spaces and the resultant seething discontent, cynicism and hopelessness that is so prevalent in affected areas such as Wigan. It speaks volumes of the lack of capacity of the central state and of local authorities to tackle  systematic blockages such as public housing and its necessary accompanying infrastructure. In his review of Sam Freedman’s book Failed State: Why Britain Doesn’t Work and How We Can Fix It, Steve Conley runs the ruler over Freedman’s central claim: that decades of over-centralisation and reckless outsourcing, have hollowed out the state, leaving public services expensive, inefficient, and unaccountable. By centralisation, Freedman explains that because successive governments have stripped local councils of powers and funding, making communities dependent on Whitehall. In what he describes as the “Outsourcing Trap,” Freedman describes how from the 1980s, core municipal services once provided in-house were forced into the market. Refuse collection, cleaning and – most disastrously children’s homes – were handed to private contractors. Today, three quarters of residential care homes are run by private equity firms, charging councils up to £6,000 per child per week while making double digit profits. Vulnerable children are often displaced hundreds of miles from family networks, with damaging consequences.[6]

Freedman sets three competency tests for outsourcing: real competition, measurable outcomes, and the shift of risk to the provider. Where these conditions are absent, as has happened in children’s care, probation, and security to name three of the most blatant examples, outsourcing is doomed with sometimes catastrophic consequences as in the aforementioned trio. Yet the same conglomerates keep winning contracts despite repeated scandals involving Serco, G45, Atos and others.[7] Serco, in particular, is so integral to the British state that Margaret Hodge ,the Labour politician and former Chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee who led an investigation into Serco, has called it “too big to fail", because, “there are too many services that would collapse” if it went bankrupt. This despite the Serious Fraud Office investigation into Serco over a multimillion-pound fraud and false accounting, overcharging to tag criminals who didn’t exist which led to a fine of £19.2m for Serco (and the eventual clearing of bosses for fraud).[8]

This frank admission by Margaret Hodge speaks volumes about the democratic deficit that swirls around outsourcing. Parliament struggles to hold the executive to account while governments chase headlines in the 24-hour news cycle. The result is a state run by media reaction, not coherent planning. The weakening of British institutions by privatisation and short-termism has made it easier for poor leaders (and bad actors like former No 10 Chief of Staff Dominic Cummings) to stick to easy, technocratic fixes (which the likely outgoing PM Starmer has often been berated for) rather than embarking on the necessary structural reform of the UK’s fractured state without which it will continue to be locked into a circle of dependency on private profiteers and weak accountability with possibly terminal effects on democracy.

To return to Makerfield for the last time, Anoosh Chakelian gives a necessary corrective to the “luxury hotels” falsehoods spread by the far right. There were nearly 5,000 complaints against asylum contractors escalated to the Home Office between 2022 and 2025, including payments issues, “property suitability”, food not meting the legal standards, and staff behaviour towards asylum seekers, according to documents she obtained via a Freedom of Information request. Serco featured in 1,816 of the 4,962 complaints escalated, surpassed only by Clearsprings’ 1.975. She cites a former Serco hotel worker at the Metropole Hotel in Blackpool who blew the whistle to the online publication the Lead last year on “terrible conditions” at the hotel, including collapsing ceilings and raw sewage leaks.[9]

Chakelian also comments on the experiences of those at the sharp end of Serco services – asylum seekers, immigration detainees, people wearing GPS ankle tags when on immigration bail. Hana, an Albanian airport worker who was tricked by a gang into slave labour on a cannabis farm in England, says she was made by Serco to feel “like I was the criminal” when detained. Mariam, now a trafficking campaigner, said her own experience of being detained as a trafficking victim (while her victors walked free) has given her “lasting trauma” – feeling haunted when she hears keys jangle, and when she sees a Serco escort van in public.[10]

Thus outsourcing has served as multiple lightening rods for dissatisfaction at the malfunctioning of the British state which when mixed with populist sentiment on immigration has created toxic environments in many parts of the Sceptred Isle. It must be a priority for PM Burnham (or whoever succeeds Keir Starmer) to start rebalancing and transforming the state through the devolution of power and decision making back to communities; a shift in the organisational culture of public services from profit maximisation to citizen stewardship; the rebuilding of in-house capacity to deliver them and the creation of public trust through transparency; long-term planning and hybrid public-private innovations.[11] Otherwise Labour or even British democracy could be drinking in its last chance saloon.

References
  
[1] Anoosh Chakelian - The failed state. How Britain outsourced its politics – and lost control. The New Statesman. 12-18 June 2026 pp.21-27

[2] Ibid, pp.21-22

[3]

[4] P.22

[5] Pp.21-22

[6] Steve Conley. How Britain Outsourced Its Way Into Failure. Academy of Life Planning 19 August 2025

[7] Ibid

[8] Chakelian p.24

[9] Ibid, p.25

[10] Pp.25-26

[11] Conley, op cit

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Immigration, Asylum, Housing And The Outsourcing Of The British State

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Eleven

 

A Morning Thought @ 3184

Frankie McKillen ✍ Governments confronting secretive organisations face a recurring dilemma.

Informers provide access that surveillance, arrests and technology often cannot. Yet the most valuable informers are rarely innocent. The closer they stand to power, the more likely they are to be implicated in violence. The question therefore becomes unavoidable:

How far will a state allow an informer to go in pursuit of a greater objective?

It is a question that appears repeatedly throughout the history of organised crime, intelligence operations and political conflict. It lies behind controversies surrounding Gregory Scarpa, Stakeknife and Brian Nelson. It lies behind allegations of collusion, claims of state protection and arguments over intelligence priorities. It lies behind some of the most bitter disputes arising from both the struggle against organised crime in the United States and the conflict in Northern Ireland.

Most comparisons between Cosa Nostra and Irish paramilitary organisations fail before they begin. The Mafia was not the IRA. The UVF was not Cosa Nostra. The political objectives, historical circumstances and social environments were entirely different. Yet the more interesting comparison is not between the organisations themselves but between the ways states responded to them.

Whether confronting Mafia families in New York or paramilitary organisations in Belfast, governments repeatedly encountered the same problem: how do you defeat a secretive, disciplined and violent organisation without becoming compromised by the methods required to penetrate it? Three comparisons help illuminate that question.

The relationship between Gregory Scarpa, Stakeknife and Brian Nelson reveals the problem of intelligence dependency. The comparison between Roy DeMeo's crew and the Shankill Butchers reveals how fear becomes an instrument of organisational power. The existence of parallel authority structures within organised crime and paramilitary-controlled communities reveals why governments became so determined to penetrate these organisations in the first place.

Together they reveal less about organised crime or the Troubles than about the behaviour of modern states.

Why States Fear Parallel Authority

Modern states claim a monopoly over legitimate force. Police arrest. Courts sentence. Governments govern. Armies fight. Everything else rests upon that foundation. The challenge posed by organised crime and paramilitary organisations was not simply that they committed crimes or acts of violence. The challenge was that they exercised authority.

Cosa Nostra settled disputes, enforced agreements, punished transgressors, collected revenue and regulated behaviour. It created consequences outside the formal legal system. For decades it exercised influence across entire sectors of economic and social life, becoming involved in labour unions, construction projects, ports, transport systems and local businesses. It frequently acted as a parallel authority in communities where state power was perceived as distant, ineffective or untrustworthy.

Republican and loyalist organisations frequently performed similar functions within their own communities. They imposed discipline, administered punishment attacks, mediated disputes, regulated criminality and exerted influence over local economies.

Many residents rejected their authority. Many feared it. Yet its existence was undeniable. Governments can tolerate dissent. Governments can tolerate criticism. What they struggle to tolerate are competing systems of power.

A burglar challenges the law. A disciplined organisation capable of commanding loyalty challenges the state itself.

Understanding this point is essential because it explains why intelligence became so important. These organisations were not viewed merely as collections of criminals or gunmen. They were viewed as alternative centres of authority.

The greater the perceived threat, the greater the pressure to penetrate them. And once penetration becomes essential, informers become indispensable.

Intelligence Dependency

No secret organisation can be defeated entirely from the outside. Eventually governments require access from within. This creates an uncomfortable reality. The best informers are often the worst people. Low-level sources provide fragments. High-level sources provide access. The closer an individual stands to power, the more useful he becomes. The closer he stands to power, however, the more likely he is to be implicated in violence.

This is where Gregory Scarpa, Stakeknife and Brian Nelson become useful comparisons. Most readers of the Troubles literature require little introduction to Stakeknife or Brian Nelson. Scarpa is less familiar.

A made member of the Colombo crime family, Gregory Scarpa spent approximately three decades providing intelligence to the FBI while simultaneously maintaining a prominent and violent position within organised crime. Nicknamed "The Grim Reaper," Scarpa was implicated in murders, extortion and other serious criminal activity while continuing to function as a highly productive source. His relationship with federal authorities later became one of the most controversial informer cases in American law-enforcement history because it raised persistent questions about what was known, what was tolerated and what may have been overlooked in order to preserve intelligence access.

Their organisations were different. Their motivations were different. Their political environments were different. Yet all occupied positions that provided extraordinary access to information. Each became valuable because of proximity to power. Each therefore confronted the state with the same dilemma.

How much should be tolerated in order to preserve intelligence access?

The controversy surrounding these figures stems from a common source. The issue is not whether they informed. The issue is whether governments became dependent upon them.

Once an intelligence asset is viewed as indispensable, ordinary standards can begin to erode. Arrests may be delayed. Investigations may be restricted. Decisions may be taken that prioritise intelligence collection over immediate intervention.

Supporters argue that such decisions save lives in the long term. Critics argue that they permit criminality in the present. Both sides claim necessity. The result is a moral grey area that has fuelled controversy for decades. The question remains the same.

At what point does protecting an informer become participating in the consequences of his protection?

When Intelligence Becomes Complicity

Every intelligence service confronts a version of this problem. If a source is sufficiently valuable, should he be protected? If protecting him allows criminality to continue, is the intelligence worth the price? If intervention exposes him, does the state sacrifice long-term security for short-term justice?

There are no easy answers. Compromise rarely arrives dramatically. It develops gradually. A prosecution is delayed. An arrest is postponed. An operation is monitored rather than disrupted.

Each decision appears defensible in isolation.

Collectively they can create circumstances in which intelligence gathering begins to resemble complicity. This is why debates surrounding Scarpa, Stakeknife and Nelson remain so contentious. The issue is not merely what these men did.

The issue is what governments were prepared to tolerate in pursuit of a greater objective.

Fear As Organisational Power

Violence kills. Fear governs. This distinction explains why Roy DeMeo's crew and the Shankill Butchers remain historically significant. Many organisations committed murder. Many individuals committed murder. What distinguished these groups was their relationship with reputation. Their names became symbols. Stories circulated. Legends developed. Fear multiplied their influence.

Most readers require little introduction to the Shankill Butchers. Roy DeMeo and his crew may be less familiar.

Operating within the Gambino crime family during the 1970s and early 1980s, the DeMeo Crew became notorious for what investigators later described as the "Gemini Method" of murder. Victims were typically lured to a location, shot, stabbed, dismembered and disposed of with chilling efficiency. The crew's reputation for extreme violence became legendary even within organised crime circles. Whether every story told about them was true became almost irrelevant. Their reputation acquired a life of its own.

The Shankill Butchers generated a similar atmosphere of fear. Their notoriety extended far beyond the number of murders attributed to them. Their name alone communicated a message.

In both cases violence functioned as communication. The objective extended beyond the immediate victim. Entire communities received the message. People adjusted their behaviour accordingly. The most effective violence is often violence that does not need to be repeated. Reputation becomes a force multiplier. Fear becomes an organisational asset.

There were, of course, important differences. The DeMeo Crew operated within a criminal environment. The Shankill Butchers operated within a sectarian conflict. The motives differed. The social context differed. Yet both demonstrate how violent organisations convert brutality into authority.

For governments attempting to penetrate such organisations, this created additional pressure. The more effective fear became as a mechanism of control, the more difficult it became to recruit sources. The more difficult it became to recruit sources, the more valuable existing informers became.

Again, the same question reappears. How much should be tolerated to preserve access?

Intelligence Wars

Many conflicts are remembered through bombings, murders, arrests and trials. Yet increasingly they become wars of information. The struggle against organised crime evolved into an intelligence contest. The struggle against republican and loyalist organisations followed a similar trajectory.Understanding networks became more important than confronting individuals. Mapping relationships became more important than counting weapons. Recruiting sources became more important than conducting raids. Information emerged as the decisive weapon.

This transformation explains why informers became so important and why controversies surrounding them continue to resonate decades later. The decisive battles increasingly occurred not in streets but in shadows.

The State And Its Necessary Devils

Scarpa, Stakeknife and Nelson illustrate intelligence dependency. The DeMeo Crew and the Shankill Butchers illustrate fear as organisational power. Parallel authority structures illustrate why governments regarded these organisations as threats demanding extraordinary attention. Together they reveal a broader truth.

The real comparison between Cosa Nostra and the Troubles is not about gangsters and gunmen. It is about power. It is about authority. And ultimately it is about the uncomfortable reality that states often deal with devils because they believe they cannot prevail without them. The central question remains unresolved.

How far should a democratic state allow an informer to go in pursuit of a greater objective?

Every intelligence service eventually confronts that question. Few answer it publicly. Fewer answer it honestly. Yet it remains one of the most enduring questions raised by organised crime, intelligence operations and the Troubles alike

🕮 Frankie McKillen is a Belfast Rockabilly

Necessary Devils 🪶 Informers, Organised Crime And The Limits Of State Power

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

Pride and Fall

Pride, the old proverb warns, comes before a fall. And so it has proved. A movement born so that a man could love a man and a woman could love a woman has been captured twice over: by capital, which rented its flag, and by an ideology that now brands same-sex attraction itself a heresy. It is a story of pride and prejudice both, and what is falling is not gay people. It is a product, and a betrayal.

Pride’s Corporate Collapse: Who Killed the Rainbow?

Something is falling, and you can measure it precisely. Among Britain’s ten largest corporations, the FTSE 100’s usual suspects of banking, brewing and retail, social media posts mentioning Pride collapsed by ninety-two per cent in two years, from fifty-two in 2023 to just four in 2025. Three quarters of Pride organisers report their corporate money drying up; a quarter of them have lost more than half.

Manchester Pride, forty years old, went into liquidation last October owing creditors more than three million pounds, leaving performers unpaid and chasing wages through a union. Across the Atlantic, donations to smaller Pride events have dropped between seventy and ninety per cent in a single year.

Continue @ Heartlands Tribune.

Pride and Fall 🪶 How Rainbow Capitalism And Gender Ideology Killed The Gay Rights Parade

Dr John Coulter ✍ Now that Red Andy has become a Westminster MP again after his comprehensive win in last week’s Makerfield by-election in England, could Northern Ireland’s sensible Left finally be within a political stone’s throw of seeing the British Labour Party contest elections in the Province.

Whilst Andy Burnham is viewed by a section of Unionism in Northern Ireland as being on the Hard Left of Labour, during the Makerfield campaign, he clearly portrayed himself as being Soft Left.

But maybe that was a convenient tactic in any plot to oust current Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer stressing that Red Andy is really a broad church of socialist opinions when it comes to appealing to the present crop of Labour MPs in the Commons.

Given the fact that Red Andy secured 55 per cent of the vote in Makerfield, some 9,000 plus votes ahead of the Right-wing Reform UK, the perception is being fuelled that Burnham is the man to ensure the political future of the so-called Red Wall of Labour-held constituencies.

There can be no doubting that after Labour’s electoral mauling in May’s elections in mainland Britain, when hundreds of Labour councillors lost their seats, the Scottish Nationalists remained in power north of the border, and Welsh Nationalists finally took control of the Welsh parliament, the clock was ticking rapidly on Starmer’s premiership.

Many Red Wall MPs were looking over their shoulders about the impact on their Commons seats if May’s disastrous results were replicated in the General Election, with Labour potentially losing dozens of seats on the Right to Reform UK and on the Left to the Green Party.

Okay, so it was only one by-election in England and the proverb states - one swallow does not make a summer. But Burnham was able to fend off any swing to the Right as happened in the council elections. The combined Right-wing vote of Reform UK and Restore Britain could only muster 42 per cent, while Burnham pushed the Labour showing up 10 per cent from the 2024 General Election.

Put bluntly, is Red Andy the man who can stop Reform UK boss Nigel Farage getting the keys to 10 Downing Street at the next Westminster showdown? More significantly, what would be the political implications for a Burnham administration for Northern Ireland?

A couple of generations have passed since there was a significant Labour presence in Ulster. The original Stormont Parliament saw the development of the Northern Ireland Labour Party as potentially a credible opposition to the Unionist Party.

But with the proroguing of Stormont in 1972, the NILP faded. For years, Northern Ireland socialists were told to join the moderate nationalist SDLP if they tried to join the British Labour Party.

There have been a few attempts at forming a Labour Party in Northern Ireland since 1972, but what is really needed is for British Labour to not just organise in the Province, but to contest elections.

Perhaps the fear among the Labour leadership at Westminster is that any move to contest elections could end up crashing and burning politically like the same fate which has befallen the Northern Ireland Tories.

Ulster socialists really don’t have much of a choice at the moment. Most parties are on the looney Left. Sinn Fein is communist; People Before Profit is a Trotskyite movement; the SDLP is Sinn Fein light, and Alliance is an integral part of the pan nationalist front.

On the unionist side, the Left-leaning Progressive Unionist Party is closely aligned to the terror gangs, the UVF and Red Hand Commando.

And long gone are the days when the pressure group, Unionist Labour, was a key component of the original Ulster Unionist Party which ran Northern Ireland for decades since partition in the 1920s.

Tactically, Burnham will have noted that on the night of his return to Parliament, the Scottish Nationalists also held their two Westminster seats in Commons by-elections.

If Burnham does manage to topple Starmer and become PM, he will have to put the brakes on the Reform UK bandwagon as well as combat the nationalist swings in Scotland and Wales.

With some opinion polls suggesting a hung Parliament after the next General Election, perhaps 18 constituencies in Northern Ireland becomes a key link in the chain for retaining Labour’s Commons majority - especially when Sinn Fein MPs still maintain their historically outdated abstentionist policy of not taking their Westminster seats.

If Burnham was to give the green light to Labour contesting elections in Northern Ireland, which council areas, Assembly seats and even Commons seats are winnable?

With many working class loyalists abandoning the ballot box and becoming part of an increasing ‘stay at home brigade’, could Labour be the key to encouraging the Protestant working class to re-engage with the electoral system?

Again put bluntly, has Burnham - if he does finally get his hands on the keys to 10 Downing Street - the ability to create a Red Wall in Northern Ireland?

In Unionism, the DUP historically under the late Rev Ian Paisley and currently the TUV under Jim Allister both gave a voice to working class loyalists.

If Burnham was to allow Labour to contest elections in Ulster, would it force the present Ulster Unionist and DUP leaderships to take more notice of Northern Ireland’s working classes?

Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. 

Will ‘Burnham Bounce’ See Labour Contest Ulster Seats?

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Ten

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