Allister Speaks out Against Undemocratic Stormont
05 March 2013
During a debate on the draft Northern Ireland Bill yesterday TUV leader Jim Allister used the opportunity to hit out at Stormont’s undemocratic structures:
“The draft Northern Ireland (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill is most notable for what it does not contain. Last week, I spoke to a politics class in one of our post-primary schools. Yes, I do not know quite what the pupils had done to deserve it. However, there you are. I asked them to name two or three key things that denote a working democracy. It was no surprise to me that they said the right to free and fair elections; the right to change your Government; and the right to have an Opposition. However, in respect of two of those — the right to change your Government, and, thereby, to vote a party out of Government, and the right to have an Opposition — we have constructed, in the House, the very antithesis of that, causing me, in another place, to describe this House as a blot on the democratic landscape, and so it is. It functions by denying the very right of an Opposition to exist and by telling Northern Ireland's voters, "Oh yes, you can vote, but you can never change your Government" and, "Oh yes, you can tinker with the pecking order in government, but you cannot vote a party out of government if it retains a handful of MLAs." That is not democracy: that is built on the very antithesis of democracy. It is little wonder that there is such a growing disconnect between the House and people, as has been demonstrated in so many ways, including by the falling turnout at elections.
“Of course, when they were spinning and selling the St Andrews Agreement, some people told us — the some being those on the nearly empty DUP Benches — that by 2015, there was bound to be a review; that we would have to put up with it for only eight years, after which there would be voluntary coalition and an Opposition; and that it was a small price to ask for a short time. Everyone knows, as I knew and said then, that it was a con. If the Secretary of State thinks that the House will self-regulate into a functioning democratic institution, she is even more deluded that I thought. The House will never address the issues that most in the House live off. There is not one politician in the Executive who is prepared to jettison the guarantee that, as of right, his or her party is for ever in government. Therefore, the House will never self-regulate.
“Last year, there was a simple illustration of that in the Committee on Procedures. I made a most modest proposal in that Committee that the growing ranks of the unattached in the House should have the rights that exist in other parliamentary institutions for a group — a technical group — of non-attached members so that, perish the thought, they could have representation on the Business Committee. We might just arrive at a situation in which we challenge the fact that only Executive parties are represented on the Business Committee and get to the point at which someone who is not in an Executive party just might get called and have the right to table an Adjournment topic or have a motion taken — something that never happens in the House. Who voted down that most basic, fundamental, starting-point proposition of a technical group? It was the cabal of the DUP and Sinn Féin.
“We should have a Government formed by people — whoever they might be — who can agree what to do about the economy, health and education, provided that they can command the requisite majority, and those who cannot do that, whoever they might be, should form the Opposition, but that threatens far too much of the vested interest in the House. That is why the House will never self-regulate itself into a working democratic institution and why it will cling to the hideous manifestations that demonstrate that it is a House not interested in people, in democracy or in affording the fundamental rights that even schoolchildren can recognise: the right to vote a party out of Government and the right to have an Opposition.”
