Editorial: A supermajority would be a sensible requirement in a border poll - but it is too late for that

​​Once again the junior Northern Ireland Office minister Steve Baker is in trouble for something he said.

Mr Baker merely said that he would prefer to see a supermajority in a border poll before a united Ireland.

This is of course a threshold that unionists would want to see before any change in the constitutional position. The Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and the late SDLP politician Seamus Mallon have talked about how problematic it will be if there is only a narrow 50% plus one majority for an all Ireland.

But the time for such a requirement was in 1998. This newspaper backed the Belfast Agreement but if any aspect of that deal has looked like a mistake it is the way in which the UK essentially lost control of the destiny of part of its territory. France, Spain, the US, etc all retain a national say on whether parts of their territory stay or go. If the region has any say at all, the nation has a greater one. Now the sole input London has against a border poll here is the right to deny one – but it can’t even do that if polls appear to show support for a united Ireland, a blocking mechanism that republicans are certain to test in court.

Note that if there is a single vote majority in favour of an all Ireland, that's it – forever. Ireland won't allow a vote to return in the future if people think a mistake has been made. So a supermajority clause would be a modest attempt to protect NI from extinction in a narrow vote scenario. You could say it is admirable that Mr Baker admits using his own suggested minimum threshold, Brexit (which he strongly backed) would itself have failed to garner sufficient support. But his comment vis a vis NI just raises unionist hopes that such a supermajority might be inserted into border poll rules. It won't.

Yesterday's angry reaction to Mr Baker’s remark showed that nationalists can describe a 50% plus one vote as unwise, but a UK Tory minister can't. He has yet to learn such rules.