Last Thursday, the people of Northern Ireland voted for 90 MLAs to form the Northern Irish Assembly. This assembly exists because the people of Northern Ireland voted for it to exist in the referendum on the Good Friday/Belfast agreement.
In both votes – the one in 1998, and the one last Thursday – people voted in the majority for a working local devolved assembly. An overwhelming majority of MLAs elected on Thursday represent parties who are committed to entering a Government and establishing local, devolved, rule.
Yesterday, the DUP leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, threw a spanner in the works:
DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson said he has told Northern Ireland Secretary of State Brandon Lewis that his party will not nominate ministers to the Stormont power-sharing Executive without “decisive action” on the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Speaking following a meeting in Belfast, Mr Donaldson said: “We have had a meeting this morning with the Secretary of State and we have made our position clear to him.
“It is the position we have held before the election, throughout the election campaign and will continue to hold, and that is until we get decisive action taken by the UK government on the protocol we will not be nominating ministers to the Executive.”
The DUP’s concerns about the protocol are legitimate. They see it as the erection of a trade and regulatory barrier inside the United Kingdom, which places Northern Ireland outside the rest of the UK, and subject to different rules. They list many disadvantages which they say accrue to Northern Ireland as a result.
But here’s the thing: They did not win the election. They did not come close to winning it. The clear position of Northern voters was to choose representatives committed to governing, imperfect though their system of Government is.
And so, we now have a situation where the clear majority – more than 70% – of Northern Irish voters are having their will about who governs them deliberately frustrated by a clear minority. There has been no Northern Irish referendum on the protocol, so we cannot say definitively that a majority endorse it, but we can say that a majority voted for parties who do not see the protocol as an impediment to forming a government.
In any other democratic society in the world, this would mean that there would now be a Northern Irish Government. In Northern Ireland, though, it means that there will not be one, and that the majority will be denied what they voted for.
(This, incidentally, is also true in one other respect: There is, clearly, no mandate of any kind for a border poll, as fewer than 40% of voters backed parties who might support one).
The question then, is this: Since the DUP and others refuse to allow the assembly to do its work, why should they be paid their salaries as members of the assembly? Or, failing that, why should it be impossible to simply form a Government without them? The Ulster Unionists, after all, have sufficient members to fill cabinet seats and represent the Unionist designation under power sharing. The DUP, if they so wish it, should be permitted to form the opposition.
This situation is a very good example of the problems with power sharing: It is not even abundantly clear that a majority of Unionist voters voted for the DUP. Alliance and the Ulster Unionists between them won a greater vote share than the DUP, though Alliance’s non-aligned designation means that Unionist voters who plumped for them do not get counted as “Unionist”. This is a weakness in the system.
We would not accept a system in the Republic where a party on 21% of the vote – say Fianna Fáil – had a veto over other parties forming a Government. They would not accept it in the UK either, or in any other country.
Nor, frankly, do the rules help the DUP in the long term. Because Northern Ireland will be governed from London, by the conservatives, those in power will have an incentive to downplay the problems with the protocol, rather than highlight them: The UK Government has a powerful incentive to present Brexit as working wonderfully. DUP Ministers in key departments might have a chance to highlight issues and problems that would otherwise be ignored.
As it is, Unionism is being poorly led, and the reasonable anti-protocol position is being allowed to be presented as a redoubt of an extreme minority. The consequences for Unionism, and Northern Ireland, are not great. If Northern Ireland is to have normal politics, then voting must have normal consequences. The DUP lost the election. It should not be permitted to have a losers veto.