Steve McIlwrath, spokesperson for the Northern Ireland Conservatives, has described Mike Nesbitt’s request to be adopted by a deprived family for 24 hours as “deeply patronising and out of touch”.
“You have to wonder on which planet the new UUP leader is living, if he thinks he can understand the stress and misery experienced by one of our most deprived families, by ‘slumming it’ for a day,” Steve remarked. “Does he honestly believe that, in 24 hours, he can gain insight into the anxiety a family experiences as it chooses which bills it can and cannot pay, or as it seeks help from a health service which is broken, or as it attempts to bring up children who are tolerant of their neighbours, in a society where segregation is the norm.”
“If, after at least 4 years in public life, Mr Nesbitt is not yet familiar with these problems, then his ivory tower must be very high indeed. The irony is that while the new UUP leader proposes gimmicks, to give the impression that he’s engaging with communities in deprived areas, he has ruled out forming an opposition at the Assembly. Yet properly holding the Executive to account for its failure to create jobs or tackle poverty in Northern Ireland would make a greater contribution to combating deprivation than any number of cheap publicity stunts.”
“It is enormously unpromising for a new party leader to show himself to be so out of touch, so early in his tenure. I come from the Shankill Road originally and I know how galling it is for people to be condescended to in this way. Mr Nesbitt should be developing policies to grow the economy and create jobs in deprived areas, to help people out of welfare dependency and into work and to nurture the Big Society in conjunction with the 3rd sector organisations who actually work with deprived people. Instead it appears that he prefers to dream up patronising and ignorant initiatives that will help absolutely no-one.”