Shami Chakrabarti can't have it both ways on Northern Ireland

Never one to shy away from a platitude, the shadow attorney general, Shami Chakrabarti, has declared that the PM must reform abortion law in Northern Ireland on the basis that women there “have been let down by privileged women and men for too long” and that, so far as Theresa May is concerned, “the test of feminists is whether they stick up for all women”. So far as this woman is concerned, I’ve been trying to work out the logic of these observations in terms of the abortion question and failing, so let’s just give up and cut to the chase.

Abortion is a devolved issue in Northern Ireland and was also quite explicitly excluded from the provisions of the 1967 Abortion Act because legislators recognised that it had a different sensibility – political and religious – on this from the rest of the UK. It was, at one time, something that both nationalists and Unionists recognised before Sinn Fein reinvented itself as a kind of Irish Republican version of Momentum, and even now, much of the party’s grassroots in the North remains traditional on this one.