Biden in Belfast: did the US president snub Sunak?

This is an audio transcript of the Politics Fix podcast episode: ‘Biden in Belfast: did the US president snub Sunak?’

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Miranda Green
There was John F Kennedy in 1963, Ronald Reagan in 1984, Clinton in 1995 and Barack Obama in 2011. But this week, it was US President Joe Biden’s turn to visit his ancestral roots in Ireland, a personal pilgrimage as much as one to mark the 25 years of the Good Friday Agreement.

Journalist
What’s your top priority on this trip, sir?

Joe Biden
Make sure the Irish accords and the Windsor Agreement stay in place, keep the peace. That’s the main thing.

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Miranda Green
Welcome to Political Fix, your essential insider guide to Westminster from the Financial Times with me, Miranda Green. Coming up, Biden’s fleeting visit to Belfast. It was defined by careful political choreography to mark the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. Did the president’s presence help or hinder efforts to end the Democratic Unionist Party’s boycott of power-sharing in Stormont? I’ll be discussing US-UK relations with our Ireland correspondent Jude Webber and FT chief political commentator Robert Shrimsley. Plus sewage — again and everywhere it’s in our rivers, in our seas. Is there a risk it could end up sweeping away Conservative councillors in the May local elections and even some Tory MPs in battleground seats? Columnist Stephen Bush and Gill Plimmer, the FT’s expert on the privatised utilities, are on hand to discuss.

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There may be issues in Northern Ireland which even Rishi Sunak’s Windsor Agreement hasn’t been able to fix. But as President Biden said during his visit to Belfast this week, back in the US, the region’s importance is one issue that politicians across America’s very partisan gulf can agree on.

Joe Biden
Supporting the people of Northern Ireland, protecting the peace, preserving the Belfast Good Friday Agreement is a priority for Democrats and Republicans alike in the United States, and that is unusual today because we’ve been very divided in our parties.

Miranda Green
Jude, thank you so much for dialling in from Dublin. Looking on from London, it seemed a bit like a whistle-stop visit to Northern Ireland from President Biden. Almost a touchdown on the way to the real action in the republic. Does this feel to you like it’s been part of the re-elect the president campaign where you are?

Jude Webber
Oh, very much so. It’s two things, really. I think it’s obviously marketed towards Irish-American voters ahead of the elections next year, but it’s also a kind of a sentimental pilgrimage by an 80-year-old man who wants to, you know, revisit his roots. It must be said that he’s visited these exact same places before and said some extremely similar things, but he’s visibly much more relaxed in the republic.

In Northern Ireland it was extremely brief. He landed on Tuesday evening, went to bed, got up, had a cup of tea with Rishi Sunak, delivered a speech at Ulster University, and then he was on his plane down to Dublin where it was, you know, the grand homecoming. And he looks just so much more relaxed and happy. And the next few days then turned into sort of this one long photo opportunity. You know, on Thursday, he did a little bit of protocol stuff, visiting the president, visiting the tea shop and addressing the joint sitting at the houses of parliament. But really, it’s all about the visit to County Louth and County Mayo, where he’s got his family.

Miranda Green
I mean, you alluded to his age there, but this is re-elect the aged president. So it’s a little bit odd if it’s just seemed sentimental and without any substance.

Jude Webber
Well, there isn’t a whole lot of substance here in the republic. There’s no press conference, which is unusual in a trip of this length. And if the meeting was an attempt to bring all parties back to the power-sharing government in Northern Ireland, which you know, I don’t think it really necessarily was, because there’s limited influence that Biden would have with the Unionist party, which is currently to blame for the collapse of the political institutions. But if in Northern Ireland he was trying to bring the parties back to Stormont, it was always going to be a very tall order because the Democratic Unionist party, which is the biggest Unionist party and has been responsible for boycotting Stormont and preventing the power-sharing executive from functioning for almost a year now because of its opposition to the Brexit trade rules. Well, they don’t necessarily trust him. They see him as an Irish-American. So there wasn’t very much room for manoeuvre in Northern Ireland anyway. But if there was any substance on this trip, it was around the Good Friday Agreement anniversary and trying to keep the Windsor framework on track, as he put it.

Miranda Green
Right. Robert, it was taken as a slight snub even to Rishi Sunak that the UK prime minister only merited 45 minutes with Biden. Is that perception a problem for Sunak? I’m wondering how much the US-UK relationship still preoccupies the British Conservative party.

Robert Shrimsley
I don’t think it’s a fundamental problem for him. I must say my innards always shrivel when I see the choreography of British prime ministers and American presidents because there’s something so appallingly servile (Miranda luaghs) about the way we cover it and think of it and talk about special relationship. That terrible needy way is absolutely awful.

Miranda Green
It’s desperate. It smells of desperation, doesn’t it?

Robert Shrimsley
And that’s not a Rishi Sunak point, that’s a general issue.

Miranda Green
Yeah.

Robert Shrimsley
There are two images that came to mind. First was the cup of tea with the president. It reminded me of sort of the final scenes of Brief Encounter — showing my age here — this repressed emotion in a rail station buffet over a cup of tea and a rock cake before they move on to other things. And the other thought is that the whole Northern Ireland part of this trip felt like, you know, the trip you have to make your in-laws before you can go on holiday somewhere else nearby. It just didn’t feel like it was the real business for Biden. And I think part of the reason for this is the fact, as Jude was talking about, is that Stormont isn’t sitting the Good Friday, the Belfast movement, can’t be said to be working. People aren’t being killed so in all the really important ways, it’s working.

But the fact that Stormont is down, that the parties aren’t really working together means it’s hard to have a sort of celebratory 25th anniversary and it’s hard for him to reap the benefits of what was, apart from being a triumph for a number of politicians in the UK, was also a bit of a triumph for a Democratic President of America. The role that Clinton played, the role that George Mitchell played as honest broker, these were really important aspects of the Good Friday Agreement, but it’s hard for Joe Biden to reap that political capital when it’s not actually functioning properly.

Miranda Green
Yes, absolutely. For me, it seemed a little disappointing for Sunak because for the last few weeks we’ve been talking about all the effort, all the pragmatism and indeed the political capital that Sunak spent on getting the Northern Ireland protocol problem solved with the Windsor accords, which finally sort of tied up the post-Brexit trading arrangements between the UK, Northern Ireland and the republic, and then to have precious little reward from Biden in terms of attention on that solution. And then the DUP still won’t play ball. He must have hoped for a bit more back from the US, no?

Robert Shrimsley
I think you’re right. I mean, I think a bigger walkabout, a more effusive greeting, something that said, you know, British prime ministers are back in the welcoming lounge of international politics, would all have been more useful to him. There’s obviously no discussion of trade deals. I don’t think anyone really expected that. So I don’t think he got a lot of political capital out of Biden’s arrival. The political capital he’s derived from this has been seeming to be someone who can attempt to fix a problem. And the win for him on Northern Ireland was getting the framework in the first place. The big win is if he can get the DUP back into Stormont. But I think he’s got his win from this in terms of domestic British politics it would have been nice to have a bigging up from the president, but he’s got what he can. I certainly think he didn’t come out of it looking fantastic in the photo. Cool, that’s for sure.

Miranda Green
So Jude, can we just revisit the Good Friday Agreement anniversary for a minute? Because that was the substantial moment that was being marked. Twenty-five years of ending the Troubles. I can remember actually zooming around in a high-security convoy at the time, helping my then boss Paddy Ashdown to campaign for a yes vote in the referendum to approve the peace deal all those years ago. And Biden made a point while he was in Northern Ireland of saying, don’t forget that the peace was not inevitable. How does it feel there this week? Is that sort of relevance of the peace process obvious day to day in Northern Ireland, or do you actually have to be of a certain age?

Jude Webber
You do have to be of a certain age in a sense, because there’s a whole generation now that’s grown up in peace since the Good Friday Agreement and they kind of think that what their parents are talking about is ancient history because it doesn’t mean anything to them and they’re really more preoccupied by pressing problems, which you could say the Good Friday Agreement, because it hasn’t delivered stable politics, hasn’t really helped in fixing. And those are the problems that other parts of the UK have as well: its failing health service, its cost of living. But these problems are really accentuated in Northern Ireland. I mean, Northern Ireland’s got a massive financial hole in the middle of its budget and London is trying to sort of play hardball by saying we lent you £300mn and now we want it back in one go. All of this is attempting to get the DUP back to Stormont.

I wasn’t in Ireland at the time of the Good Friday Agreement and I think that looking back, to a lot of people it seems inevitable. Then why wouldn’t people have voted yes, because everybody wanted the Troubles to end, and all the killing and the terror? But there were serious problems a lot of people had, I think, with how it was going to work and a lot of unionists were very worried that if republican prisoners were let out of jail without paramilitary weapons having been decommissioned, then the whole thing was gonna fall apart. So it wasn’t inevitable. I think it was right that Biden drew attention to that.

But then just going back to your earlier point on Rishi Sunak not getting a whole lot out of it, it was interesting to me that Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the head of the Democratic Unionist party that’s keeping Stormont in abeyance at the moment, he said in interviews at Ulster University on Wednesday after the Biden speech that he wasn’t expecting a renegotiation of the Windsor framework. What he was expecting was the British government to do more. And so in a sense you could say that Rishi Sunak’s had the keys to that, and if he had moved faster by giving what the unionists want is some kind of copper fastening of Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom, if he’d given them that in the words that they wanted before the anniversary, well then maybe we would have had a quite different visit by Biden.

Robert Shrimsley
I was actually there for the Good Friday Agreement. I spent one freezing night, all through the night outside Stormont buildings waiting for the deal to be signed, and back-and-forth emotions whether it was gonna happen. And the extraordinary feelings immediately after it was, you know, one of the great political achievements of British politics of my lifetime. I’ve spent my early career covering bombings. So, you know, it was an amazing thing to happen that people who don’t remember life before the Good Friday Agreement don’t really understand what an enormous total scar on UK life this was.

But I do think the one thing that’s come clear, you know, this was the result of a lot of politicians putting a lot of work into getting agreement. And it started before Tony Blair with John Major putting work in. Blair did a phenomenal amount. The Irish leader, Bertie Ahern, the individual politicians in Northern Ireland — John Hume, David Trimble and some — people put in a tonne of work, and then they put in a tonne of work to make sure the deal was approved in the vote and to keep it afloat through all the many problems.

And one of the things we’re seeing is what sort of happens when the work isn’t done, that’s taken for granted. And one reason perhaps why Rishi Sunak isn’t getting the lack of honour in all of this is, of course, Brexit, of which he was an early advocate. The fact is what caused a lot of these problems was that they didn’t think through the consequences of Brexit when they pushed for it, and what we’re seeing now is I think politicians, especially in London — I think Dublin’s always understood it better — but politicians in London understanding this is something you’ve got to keep working at. And the Windsor framework is not gonna be the end of this. They’re gonna have to keep working at it and one of the reasons why I think this felt such an anticlimax in the Northern Ireland leg of Biden’s visit is that people can see that we’re only in the beginnings of, you know, of marriage counselling as it were. There’s a long, long way to go.

Miranda Green
Robert, I completely agree with you. It is actually one of the great achievements of modern politics bringing an end to the Troubles. Jude, in fact, you’ve been writing a lot in recent weeks about the kind of threat of a revival of violence or also enduring violence. And of course, in the run-up to Biden’s visit, there was a threat of dissident republican pipe bombs. You wrote a lot about the extreme loyalist paramilitaries and their ongoing criminal dominance through violence in some communities in Belfast. Does that violence still seem to be simmering below the surface now?

Jude Webber
Yeah. I mean, it’s nothing like the violence on the scale during the Troubles. The dissident republican pipe bombs in Derry found on Tuesday after a parade on Monday — it was a very small incident. There were a few firebombs thrown at police and, you know, yes, it’s shocking that still happens but in no way was it comparable to anything that went before. And loyalist paramilitaries still do have a grip on some communities. It’s not a failing of the Good Friday Agreement.

It’s just that I think what Brexit has also done is really brought identity back to the fore in Northern Ireland. And politics is all about identity. It’s about whether you want to stress your place in the United Kingdom, which is now this Brexit UK, or you want to rejoin with Ireland and therefore rejoin the EU. And identity politics in Northern Ireland have always been kind of a recipe for disaster. And that’s also being churned up again by the fact that we don’t really have only the traditional unionist nationalist blocs anymore. We’ve now got the Nationalist party, Sinn Féin is the biggest party, unionists playing second fiddle in a region that was created for them. And there’s a rising third force which aligns neither with unionists nor with nationalists, and that’s going to change the dynamics of politics.

In fact, the Alliance party, which is the biggest party representing these sort of others, is already pushing for changes to the Good Friday Agreement because they say that their votes and their voice doesn’t really count and they’re not wrong. But one of the reasons why there is still enduring conflict is because there’s massive deprivation and these are things that haven’t been able to be fixed. And stop-start politics is part of the reason why.

Miranda Green
Robert, as we end the final thought on Biden, it seems he’s not coming to London next month for King Charles’s coronation. This Ireland trip, on the other hand, is his longest visit as president to another country. Does the UK need to realise that we’re just not that important to Washington these days?

Robert Shrimsley
I think that would be overstating. The role of Britain is still pretty important as an ally. This is a president that’s prepared to upset quite a lot of people and I think is just heavily focused on the domestic political agenda and will wheel in and out their allies as it seems useful. I don’t think we are massively less as a country important that there’s clearly a bit of a temperamental clash between Democrat Joe Biden and Brexit, the Conservative party.

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Miranda Green
Thank you both very much. Over the Easter break, perhaps you’ve been lucky enough to escape the big smoke and experienced something like this. (Sound of flowing water and birds chirping) But just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, a plague of sewage has been flowing into our rivers and into the sea. Figures from the Environment Agency showed a total of over 300,000 sewage spills last year. It’s down a bit on 2021 overall, and the agency put that largely down to drier weather. But there were over 3,000 zones where raw sewage was dumped frequently, which is up over 60 per cent year on year. In fact, the regulator, it seems, is struggling to crack down on the privatised water companies and ministers seem to have backed off from greater penalties. Stephen and Gill, thank you for joining me. Gill, first of all, you are acknowledged sewage dump expert. (Laughter) Sorry if that title is disagreeable, but briefly, is this situation on polluted beaches, rivers and lakes as bad as the endless stories suggest and how did we get here?

Gill Plimmer
I think it’s possibly worse because essentially the water companies monitor their own sewage outflows. They self-report and they’ve been doing that for the past 10 years. So we don’t actually know how much sewage is flowing into rivers and beaches and into households in their back gardens. And we’ve already found in the past some court cases have shown misreported data. And although they installed electronic monitors on some of the pipes, it’s not on all of them and they only take them during some times of the day and so forth.

Miranda Green
And this is directly as a consequence of the way the water industry was privatised all those years ago. Is it or is it regulatory failure, in fact, or both?

Gill Plimmer
Well, I think it’s probably both and the two are connected and the regulators essentially have been set up since privatisation. And their job in some ways is to defend that model and see that it works whether or not it’s the best. And you have to remember that the UK is the only country in the world that has actually privatised its entire water system. Although other countries have handed out contracts to managers for a set period of years, none of them have actually done this wholesale privatisation of all the water company infrastructure and water.

Miranda Green
So why doesn’t the government act more decisively if the regulatory structure is part of the problem? The public are angry enough now that they’re looking at the penalties, questioning them. Ministers, it seems, promised to be firm, but then they back off again.

Gill Plimmer
Well, it’s complicated because all the money that goes into the system comes from customer bills, and Ofwat’s remit is essentially to keep customer bills down. And of course, what’s happened is that the water companies which were privatised with no debt — sort of 1989 — have now racked up £60.6bn worth of debt and now we’re all paying for that interest. And the trouble is that at the same time they haven’t invested in the infrastructure; the sewage treatment works haven’t been modernised, the pipes haven’t been fixed, and they just as insufficient capacity in the system to treat this growing population’s sewage needs.

Miranda Green
And I think there’s a terrifyingly large figure, isn’t there, for what the cost of the infrastructure backlog would be to fix it and make it able to cope?

Gill Plimmer
Yes, the figures disputed at sort of outlined at £350bn-£600bn. I mean, who knows quite how they came up with that figure. That seems to be the cost of separating all the sewage outflows from the water pipes. And I’m sure there’s smaller, more efficient things that could be done for a much lower price. The trouble is, who will pay for it? The water companies have all this debt, customer bills are already high enough, people are struggling. So the big question is, is there the government commitment to actually take on the cost of the failing infrastructure?

Miranda Green
Right, got it. So Stephen, upsetting scenes, I suppose, for nature lovers and swimmers alike. But it’s an ill wind as it were. These scenes are a great campaigning opportunity for the opposition parties. My inbox and yours, I’m sure, is full of materials from the opposition parties mentioning marginal target areas that are quite often blue on yellow fights. Tory versus Lib Dem actually — Cumbria, the South West, Oxfordshire. This has got to be a big danger to the Tory marginals and to the local elections Tory candidates next month, no?

Stephen Bush
Yeah, partly because we can have a very interesting debate about other state functions. You know, people have different views about healthcare or whatever, but that sewage not be pumped into the sea is basically up there with roads and basic policing as the essential functions people expect to get from a state. And you know, I was talking to a Conservative MP who said, well look, what is our biggest problem at the next election? It’s the perception that everything is falling apart and the government is tired and useless. And they said, and how could we better underline that than pouring excrement — except they used a much less podcast-friendly word than excrement (Miranda laughs) — into the sea. So yeah, it’s a huge problem.

But exactly as Gill alludes to, the interesting thing here is yes, the opposition is putting it on their leaflets, but you talk to people in the Labour party in particular and they feel very frustrated that the Lib Dems have really been the main character, as it were, among the opposition parties. And although it is, I think, pretty hard to look at this with an open mind and conclude that water privatisation was anything other than a bad idea, you can’t easily give the how many billion pounds of dividends and money back. So you’ve got to get someone to pay for it in the here and now. And so, it is a big political problem for the government just because it makes everything look tatty. But one of the reasons why the opposition parties have not yet maximised as much as they perhaps could and should is that they themselves haven’t worked out the question of OK, obviously there’s been under-investment, how are we going to go about leveraging that investment back into the system?

Miranda Green
Yeah, I agree with both of you. I think it seems to be the kind of screaming void at the centre of this debate over sewage. Gill, when I did a little bit of reporting on this story myself, on the situation in Hastings, it seemed to me that the campaign was drawing in people of all political stripes and they were all equally angry. But the demands of the main campaigners were very much to the left, if you see what I mean. They were saying just renationalise. Are there other solutions, because that is extremely unlikely and I’m actually not aware that there’s any political party proposing that?

Gill Plimmer
I think you’re right. There’s no political party proposing that, although the Green party has probably got closest to it. But in some cases, if you look at rail, for example, the government has been forced to quasi-renationalise at times. And it’s not impossible that could happen with water. I mean, we’ve already had Southern Water’s on the brink of bankruptcy, Ofwat doing the secretive deal to get Macquarie, the Australian infrastructure bank, to bail it out. Other companies, Thames Water, has got huge amount of debt. Its interest rates are rising. It’s got this huge pressure to invest in infrastructure. So it’s not impossible that any government may be forced to look at some kind of renationalisation.

Miranda Green
And Stephen, I suppose just to round it off, these local elections next month in May, they’re already looking quite difficult for the Tories. This sewage issue doesn’t help, right?

Stephen Bush
Well, it does and it doesn’t, right, in that we shouldn’t forget at 3am when people like me will be on Radio 4 and 5 live going, “oh, what’s happening here?” is that there will be an unfortunate junior minister in the job of going, no, no, no, we’ve got to understand, is actually these results are great, and I suspect that the failures of the water companies will become a political line to take. If you’re a Conservative minister who needs to find a way of saying, look, this doesn’t show that we’re doomed. This doesn’t reflect poorly on the prime minister. Well, you can’t pivot to the 13 years of government beforehand. You can’t go, well, actually, maybe these gains than we all expect. And having been out in the country this week talking to people myself, I think it’s pretty clear that those gains are going to materialise for the opposition parties. So I suspect the thing which would really spook me if I were running any of these water companies is that I think the days after the election, lots of Conservatives will say actually there was a problem with the water companies and, you know, maybe the heavy fines didn’t . . . Ranil Jayawardena, in his very shortlived stint as Defra secretary, was flirting with will come back into vogue again.

Gill Plimmer
It’s become a massively populist issue, hasn’t it, that sort of crosses all parties?

Stephen Bush
Yeah. I was speaking to a Conservative former minister the other day. He said that what they thought would happen was what they described as a “glide path” towards nationalisation, where they said, well, yeah, look, clearly these industries are not very well run. They said, clearly we should try and get as much of the money to fix the problem from the companies as possible. But eventually these companies will start keeling over and that will be the point that they go back into public ownership. And when you have Conservatives talking in that language about these companies, you can see that the political debate on them has moved to a very strong consensus position. But yeah, very far away from where we were on water privatisation even at the start of the century.

Miranda Green
It’s amazing really. I think we can all three agree it’s a mess of some scale politically and in every other sense. Thank you both very much!

And that’s it for this episode of The FT’s Political Fix, presented from home this week where I’m stuck with a Covidy child.

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Stephen Bush
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