*Coming to Terms with the Far-Reaching Political Implications of the Murphy Review*
Today the Government has published the Independent Review of the Windsor Framework, the Murphy Review.
The report is of immense political importance not just for Northern Ireland but for the United Kingdom as a whole and its relationship with the European Union going forward.
On 10 December 2024 the UK Government imposed the first forced majoritarian vote on Stormont in over fifty years in violation not only of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement cross community consent protection, but of the effective convention going back to 1972 that says there can be no forced majoritarian votes at Stormont on propositions that either community regards as constituting an existential threat to itself.
The motion Stormont was required to debate and put to the vote on 10 December presented the most profound existential threat to unionists of any motion to come before it not just since 1972 but since 1921. The proposal was that MLAs vote to effectively disenfranchise their constituents in relation to 300 areas of law-making for four years, subjecting Northern Ireland to laws made by the Republic of Ireland and the 26 other states of the EU, for the purpose of replacing the UK internal market for goods with an all-Ireland internal market for goods. Not only that but the arrangement involved the separation of Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK by an international customs border and licensed our moving towards the creation of the economic foundation of an all-Ireland polity.
Every single unionist MLA voted against the proposal such that far from achieving cross community consent, a majority decision was imposed in the face of the very strong opposition of all unionists.
To really appreciate the difficulty, though, we must remember that unionists had been expected to sacrifice the full benefits of majoritarian democracy for forty-five years between 1972 and 2017 when we commanded, or would have commanded, a majority at Stormont, in order to protect nationalists from the introduction of changes to which they objected. The proposal to depart from this principle to the cost of unionists after 2017 was, and is, plainly unsustainable, constituting a massive violation of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement principle of parity of esteem because it says that while it was perfectly acceptable to deny unionists the full benefits of majoritarian democracy for 45 years, to protect nationalists, it is fine to deny unionists the same protection once we ceased to be able to determine Assembly decision-making on a majoritarian basis.
Thus, on 10 December we were confronted with not one but two hugely controversial and destabilising developments. In the first instance, the biggest proposed change to Northern Ireland since 1921, presenting the gravest existential threat to unionists in 103 years. In the second instance, the imposition of the vote on a basis that pretended that the last fifty-two years of Northern Ireland politics never happened and that it is perfectly acceptable for Stormont to impose change on a majoritarian basis when one community objects, and in the strongest possible terms.
There was, however, a sense in which the full enormity of what took place on 10 December 2024 was suspended on 11 December by the knowledge that the legislation mandating the vote also required an ‘independent review’ in the event that the 10 December motion was passed on a majoritarian basis without cross community consent.
The law required the review to consider both continuing and terminating alignment. While some of us doubted whether this requirement would be complied with because of the Secretary of State’s contradictory, subsequent terms of references, the review held out the prospect that it might: i) consider the implications of moving away from the complete prohibition on majoritarian voting at Stormont on matters constituting the gravest existential threat to one community and ii) recommend the restoration of this critical protection.
However, following its publication today, it is now clear that the review has not even considered the impact of the departure from this convention, let alone made a recommendation that it should be restored. We now know that the constitutionally destructive implications of 10th December have effectively been confirmed and there is no recommendation for the Secretary of State to put this right. The implication of the report is simply that we must now accept that while nationalists were worthy of protection from majoritarianism for 45 years, unionists are not, even in relation to the 10 December proposition which presented the gravest existential threat to any community since 1921.
It is quite impossible to overstate the enormity of this political moment for Northern Ireland. If unionism is to have a future, urgent action must now be taken. All self-respecting unionists who wish Northern Ireland to remain in the UK but sit on the Northern Ireland Executive that is currently giving effect to the 10 December vote and the dismantling of the UK, should now withdraw with immediate effect. Failure to do so cannot but have the effect of accommodating the removal of a critical foundation of the Northern Ireland political settlement in a way that accepts institutional discrimination against unionists, who were forced to forego the benefits of normal majority voting on controversial matters for 45 years out of regard for protecting nationalists, and in order to dismantle the economic foundation of the union, subjecting it to the gravest existential threat in over two hundred years.
In all this we are confronted by the appalling behaviour of the European Union. As Michel Barnier’s ‘My Secret Brexit Diary’ makes clear, it was the EU that insisted on setting aside cross community consent and that any vote on the Protocol at Stormont must be on the basis of simple majoritarianism because the alternative was not convenient for their purpose. They charged in where angels feared to tread and simply demanded the removal of cross community consent without any thought for the history of Northern Ireland and the implications of doing so. Moreover, they adopted this extra-ordinary approach notwithstanding the fact that Sir Jonathan Faull, EU Commission Director-General of Justice and Home Affairs from 2003 to 2010, Director-General of Internal Market and Services Directorate-General from 2010 to 2015 and Director-General of “Task Force for Strategic Issues related to the UK Referendum”, had devised a means of protecting the integrity of the EU Single Market without infra-structure on the NIUK-ROI land border, Mutual Enforcement, that if pursued would have made the 10 December vote completely unnecessary.
Today’s events put into sharper focus than ever before the question about whether the United Kingdom public is prepared to tolerate the current Government’s determination to seek a closer relationship with the EU, an organisation that is plainly intent on seeking to cut us in two regardless of the consequences.
