Fintan O’Toole: Liz Truss’s hollowing out of Britishness surely alarms unionists

That unionists are crazy to support the Conservative Party’s great Brexit misadventure is increasingly obvious. But there’s another reason why anyone who wants Northern Ireland to stay in the UK should be working hard to bring down the Tories.

It’s the shredding of the welfare state. If Brexit is a precision bomb aimed at the heart of nationalist consent to the union, Liz Truss’s zealous dismantling of what is left of social democracy is a missile aimed at its pocket.

Like most Irish people of my age, I have a lot of English first cousins. Many of my aunts and uncles joined the great movement eastwards across the Irish Sea in the 1950s.

But I’ve always maintained that they emigrated, not so much to England as to social democracy. Ireland as a State largely missed out on the postwar construction of welfare states. But Irish people could ensure they did not miss out by taking a short ride on the Holyhead boat.

I am not suggesting that England was a paradise for Irish people. Yet it did have free second-level education, generous grants for college students, a free national health service and public housing. If you were working-class in Ireland or grew up on a small farm, the British welfare state was immensely attractive.

It meant that Irish people could (very quietly) look to Britain with admiration and respect. Even – whisper it – with gratitude.

And looking to Britain was precisely what Irish policymakers did. Long after independence, even long after Ireland joined the EU, the benchmark for judging Ireland was set across the Irish Sea.

A lot of our welfare legislation was directly based on watered-down versions of British precedents. This made it even more obvious that Ireland was a pale shadow of the UK.

Even through the veil of inherited Anglophobia, it was easy to see that Britishness wasn’t just about waving the flag and toasting the queen. It contained a profound decency that radiated a soft power.

It is striking that, although the unionist regime in Northern Ireland always had the ability to opt out of the British social security system, or to lower the rates of benefits, it chose not to do so. It recognised that the system presented nationalists in Northern Ireland with an excruciating contradiction.

On the one hand, they suffered the effects of economic discrimination. But on the other, they had higher welfare payments, much better healthcare and far greater access to educational opportunity than they would have had if they lived in the Republic.

A simple but telling example is schoolbooks. Last week, the Irish Government announced that primary school pupils will get them free from next year. North of the Border, they’ve been free for 75 years.

[ Fintan O'Toole: Ireland is excruciatingly slow to use public money to help ordinary people ]

The model often quoted now for Irish unity is the reunification of Germany in 1990. But for most of the history of Irish partition, this analogy was upside down. In relation to the welfare state, most Irish people would really have liked a reverse takeover by the North.

Conversely, the nationalist offer to Northern Ireland relied almost entirely on emotion. As a practical proposition it was, for working-class people, a dud: marry us not for better but for worse conditions.

In relation to the welfare state, most Irish people would really have liked a reverse takeover by the North

In the 1980s, though, Margaret Thatcher began to shift this balance. The neoliberal assault on social democracy took some of the shine off the British welfare state.

In 1978, just before Thatcher took power, a three-child family on unemployment assistance received just under half the average wage in Ireland, but close to 60 per cent in Britain. By 1994, the British figure had fallen to 43 per cent of the average wage, while the Irish equivalent had risen to almost 60 per cent.

Overall, though, it was probably still better to be in need of welfare in Britain than in Ireland. Even if direct payments were lower, you had free healthcare, housing benefits were much better and education was more accessible.

The return of the Conservatives to power in 2010 changed the equation. Austerity under David Cameron was aimed largely at poorer people. Cuts have been relentless and savage, tipping millions of people into destitution. Food banks have become staples of life for whole communities.

[ Fintan O’Toole: Prominence of Northern Irish identity will complicate a united Ireland ]

The Irish version of austerity after the crash of 2008 had similar elements of sheer nastiness. Young people, lone-parent families and people with disabilities were made to do penance for the sins of bankers and property developers.

But the welfare state has not regressed as rapidly or as deeply in Ireland as it has in the UK. The standard rate of unemployment benefit in the Republic is more than twice the rate in the UK. The full state pension in the UK is the equivalent of €209 a week. South of the Border, it’s €253.

The result is that, as John Burn-Murdoch has calculated in the Financial Times, the poorest people in Ireland now have a standard of living which is 63 per cent higher than their counterparts in Britain.

The welfare state is not just about social security, of course. But university fees in England are the equivalent of €10,660 a year. In Ireland, for most students, they are a quarter of that.

The trump card in this argument has always been the UK’s National Health Service. In principle, it is vastly better than Ireland’s dire two-tier system. But the Conservatives are destroying that too.

There was a time when almost no one in Northern Ireland had a significant wait for hospital treatment. In June, however, 658,000 people were on a waiting list. The British health system is levelling down to Irish standards.

And now comes the “Brexit dividend”, which turns out to be an ultra-neoliberal cult set on making poor and middle-income people pay for tax cuts for the rich. Liz Truss’s calamity government may look like a comedy act, but there will be nothing funny about the way it kills off the British welfare state.

I genuinely don’t understand what unionists don’t get about this. If the innate nastiness doesn’t disgust them, then surely the hollowing-out of Britishness must alarm them.

[ Fintan O’Toole: Fine Gael’s hysterical response to tax report is disgraceful and aims to stifle debate ]

Nationality and identity are not all about economics or welfare. Rational calculation is only one part of a sense of belonging. But if you are in a competition for allegiance, these reckonings carry a lot of weight.

Unionists can double down on the monarchy, on the flag, on Protestantism, on the protocol. But none of them compensate for the loss of the thing that made Irish nationalists most uncomfortable: the evident superiority of the British welfare state.

If they had a stim of wit, they’d be trying to get the Tories out of power before that party shreds the last vestiges of what really made Britain great.