Not Just a Walk Down the Garvaghy Road

Consociationalism is a very hard word -  if you can't spell it you're the biggest dunce in the world (or was that antidisestablishmentarianism?)

Northern Ireland is a power-sharing plus (to use an easier term) model of what the New Labour project hopes to turn the United Kingdom into: a social corporatist state with every minority represented and every minority able to feed in its concerns and views on forms of social organisation.  Not a democracy with a  single sociocultural,  political, or even economic consensus, and with a policy  manifestos  presented by multi-interest group parties, for which a majority of the electorate votes; but elites from subsets seeking accommodations to maintain themselves in power to administer the state in the interests first of elite-defined good, and then to sustain their minority group deference by distribution of reward.

In  Northern Ireland  the further objective of a united Ireland on the part of the external players - the New Labour administration, the southern Irish government, and the United States Democratic party and administration is, unfortunately for the project,  in serious conflict with the sovereignty of the United Kingdom, which is what matters most of all to the Unionists both in Ireland and in the incoming Conservative administration.   If the New Labour construct  collapses because the Unionists insist on blocking the 'path' to unification then even the sectarianism in one of the more sectarian parts of the UK is not strong enough to drive out pluralist democracy and firm allegiance to the sovereign state.  That would be very bad news for New Labour,  and even worse for Brown, whose last claim to anything is as arch-manipulator of sectarian accommodations.

Brown has threatened to with hold £8oo million, Mrs Clinton has stated there will be 'economic consequences' if judicial and police powers are kept in the hands of the UK state by Unionist defiance.  What is at stake is much more than Northern Ireland's Assembly arrangements.  It's the New Labour vision.  That's what all this stakeholding, and ethnic judicial systems and courts,  and the apparently wanton destruction by invalidation and criminalisation of many aspects of our indigenous culture is all about.