We approached last week’s General Election on a very different basis to that of 12 December 2019. Back then, in Northern Ireland we enjoyed the right to stand for election to make all the laws to which we were subject. But since 1 January 2021 this right has been taken from us through the application of the provisions of the Northern Ireland Protocol – amended and renamed the Windsor Framework in 2023 – not just in relation to one, but three hundred areas of law.
A live example of this is provided by the current EU proposal to ban the use of dental amalgam in both the EU and Northern Ireland from 1 January 2025 which, if implemented, dentists warn will make NHS dental services unsustainable in NI, even as they continue in GB, because the alternatives to amalgam are so much more expensive.
Northern Ireland is the only place in the world where having enjoyed full democracy – and therein the right to stand for election to make all the laws to which we were subject – we now find key aspects of our vote withdrawn and our effective reconstitution into a partial democracy. That would be a completely unacceptable development in any country, but it is a particularly unacceptable in Northern Ireland for at least two reasons.
Firstly, during the Troubles some were persuaded to give up on democracy in favour of trying to advance political change through terrorism. It is principally for this reason that the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, in setting out a new approach, commits the state parties to upholding the rights of the people of Northern Ireland to ‘pursue democratically national and political aspirations’. This obligation can only be understood as a requirement to uphold (at a minimum) that entitlement from the point at which it was conferred in 1998, when the people of Northern Ireland had the right to ‘pursue democratically national and political aspirations’ by seeking election to the legislatures making all the laws to which we were subject.
A second reason is grounded in the centrality of democracy to Northern Ireland, courtesy of the Ulster Scots tradition. In this regard it is vital that we never lose sight of the role played by the Ulster Scots worldview in developing the ‘no taxation without representation’ principle of the eighteenth century, which has since evolved into the broader effective principle of ‘no legislation without representation’.
Although the US Declaration of Independence did not come until 4 July 1776, the real moment of the birth of America as a conscious political community arguably came with the Boston Tea Party three years earlier, when the people of Boston refused to pay a tax imposed on them by Westminster in which they had no representation. Of critical importance for our purposes, the people who led this campaign were overwhelmingly Ulster Scots, articulating their tradition and values. If we then fast forward to the 1820s and the Presidency of Andrew Jackson, the first Ulster Scots President of the United States – whose parents had only left Carrickfergus for America two years prior to the birth of their son – we are confronted with the politician whose introduction of universal male suffrage again clearly conveyed his Ulster Scots worldview and gave rise to what appropriately became known as the Democrat Party.
In the context of celebrating the right to stand for election to actually make the laws to which we are subject, the suggestion that the problem of our disenfranchisement can be fixed by securing the second class citizenship conferred by the Stormont Brake – the right to try and stop the application of some of the laws that have already been made for us by the Parliament of another polity in which we are not represented – simply does not work. It is not true to who we are.
However, we must recognise that the most important point to make here is not a Northern Ireland specific argument. The partial disenfranchisement of the people of Northern Ireland actually constitutes a very dangerous historical turn which should be of concern to the Western world as a whole. Our form of Government only works if democracy works, and if we start unpicking it in one part of the country, saying that it does not matter if our vote is taken away in relation to some matters, we necessarily imply that having previously had the vote in relation to all the laws to which we were subject was never really important. At a time when, as the Guardian newspaper has pointed out, young people increasingly question democracy and express interest in the alternatives, this forms a dangerous and politically deeply unsettling precedent.
Democracy is, for me, a non-negotiable basic standard of civility. In a context where there are two ways of protecting the integrity of the EU Single Market – one that involves partly disenfranchising 1.9 million people (the Irish Sea Border), the other (Mutual Enforcement) which does not – there can be no debate about the way forward. It must be Mutual Enforcement. For so long as the UK, Republic of Ireland and EU aspire to be champions of democracy, the current arrangement is completely unsustainable.
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