Editorial: The Stormont brake is shown to be a weak safeguard for Northern Ireland against EU law

​The government's decision not to pull the Stormont Brake is a worrying development, raising further questions about the extent to which the protections negotiated under the Windsor Framework really provide a check on EU law.

​The political balance at Stormont relies on the principle that there is both unionist and nationalist consent for key decisions – but that bedrock of devolution in NI has been cast aside time and again over the Irish Sea border.

There are four main 'protections' for Northern Ireland in the latest iteration of the NI Protocol. The first and most significant is the ability of Stormont to block its continued application entirely. However, cross-community support is not required, meaning it has been continued over the heads of unionists.

The second is the ability of the assembly to halt entirely new EU laws if they don't have cross-community backing. This happened with new rules in March of last year, but the UK government is yet to make a formal decision whether to block them.

The third is the Stormont committee meant to scrutinise new EU laws – a body described as "comatose" by one of its own members, Steve Aiken MLA. It has an inbuilt Sinn Fein and Alliance majority and has repeatedly blocked unionist requests for inquiries to examine the impact of new Brussels laws on the UK's internal market.

Now, concerns about the impotency of the fourth safeguard – the Stormont Brake – have been realised. The Stormont Brake is not much of a brake at all. While it allows unionists to let off steam – it leaves them and businesses at the mercy of UK government whose wider goal of a ‘reset’ of relations with Brussels will inevitably lead to avoiding a row with Europe. None of this cuts the pipeline of EU law as was claimed. The current situation is not democratic and not tenable in the long term.