As in a slow-motion car crash, the Stormont administration inches towards collapse. The primary reason for that collapse is self -evident - failure to agree an austerity budget.
 
Yet what is bizarre about the situation is that all the major parties support austerity. They all voted for the budget. The crisis arises out of Sinn Fein pulling back on one issue. The sticking plaster they were offered over welfare reform proved not to be big enough. They continue to accept benefit cuts, 20,000 public sector redundancies, mass  privatisation  and the transfer of wealth from poor to rich through a corporation tax subsidy.
 
The immediate check on Sinn Fein is their prospects in the coming 26 county election.  Although they have applied plenty of cuts in  public services, they are aware that the adoption of the Stormont House agreement would lead to a catastrophic fall in support. 
 
Devastating 
 
Also important is their awareness of the devastating impact of the cuts on the most deprived   elements of their Northern base. However the overwhelming concern is the realization that agreement to Stormont House would immediately be followed by demands to impose their part of the new set of £12 billion cuts planned by the  Tories.
 
This nuclear option will devastate society and lead to the destruction of Sinn Fein. In refusing to sign up they are showing a realistic fear of their own supporters.
 
The DUP, on the other hand, are composed almost entirely of the small business class that plan to join in the feeding frenzy as public services are broken up. They are a pro-imperialist party that places great trust in the power of the baton of sectarianism and the Orange Order and paramilitaries who wield the baton to police their supporters.
 
Complacency
 
Yet this is a crisis that poses no immediate threat. The political settlement is unravelling, but the parties are united in supporting the overall outlines of austerity and maintaining the sectarian carve-up of resources. They have just won an election fought on the basis of sectarianism. There is little in the way of direct political opposition.
 
This is especially noticeable in relation to the trade unions and socialist groups. A day of action was followed by an election truce was followed by - silence! The Socialist  Party fought a brief    campaign within the union movement for greater activism and then fell into line. The SWP were utterly silent, concentrating on vague slogans within an electoral campaign.
 
Collapse of opposition 
 
The immediate reason for the collapse of opposition is that the de facto policy of both unions and socialist groups was to await the arrival of the Labour party in government and to unite around a policy of reforming capitalism. They are now left without a coherent strategy. 
 
A deeper reason is that almost everyone supports the existing system. Everyone knows the system  is a colonial setup but thinks anything else impossible and that Britain will act to ensure fairness. Everyone knows it is sectarian but believes that Stormont will gradually evolve towards  democracy. These views exist as a formal theory of stages advanced by the Communist  Party as a bulwark against revolution.
 
The remaining republican groups reject the majority reformism but tend to work alone and lack a class programme.
 
Against this background silence a mass attack on working people is gathering pace. Whatever    happens in the Stormont circus - agreement or  disagreement - the austerity programme will be imposed.
 
Default
 
Among the silence there are default programmes. The default programme of the trade unions is to lobby Stormont and manage the austerity - a tendency which will be fed by ICTUs  signing a new partnership agreement with the Dublin  government and the union withdrawal from mass mobilization around Right2Water.
 
The default programme of the socialists is a reformist electoralism that they hope will get them into Stormont with a daft strategy of turning it left.
 
In absence of anything better the republican opposition has not resolved a desperate hope in military action. The British have carefully preserved the loyalist groups and their capacity for sectarian terror.
 
The battle is coming. Sections of the working class class will resist because they must. The urgent need today is to unite to propose a working class programme that utterly repudiates austerity  and the institutions that enforce it.