Allister says looming vote is ‘defining moment’ for Union - as Dodds says it 'runs contrary to the Belfast Agreement'

MLAs must decide by the end of the year whether the current trade arrangements stay in place – but there will be no vote on whether or not the controversial application of EU human rights laws continue.

The News Letter understands that the First and deputy First Ministers are yet to bring a proposal for the vote to the Assembly – and it is unlikely the DUP will agree to the joint office doing so. Any proposal would have to be affirmative, and the party will not want Emma Little Pengelly’s name attached to it.

That means any MLA can bring it

The best outcome anti-protocol parties can hope for is a failure to get cross community support at the Assembly for the trade deal – which would trigger a review of the arrangements and see another vote held in four years rather than eight. The DUP, UUP and TUV will all vote against.

In the highly unlikely event that a majority of MLAs don’t back the arrangements, they would cease to apply after two years.

Unionists have criticised that fact that such a major change to Northern Ireland’s constitutional position – with all-Ireland harmonisation by design and no democratic say in 300 areas of law – is to happen without a meaningful cross-community vote.

Speaking at the annual TUV dinner in Cookstown on Friday evening, TUV leader Jim Allister said the looming vote was a defining moment for the future of the Union.

In extracts of his speech sent to the media in advance, Mr Allister said “The Assembly vote in December will mark the embedding of the Union-dismantling Protocol and set in stone the condominium arrangements within which Stormont operates”.

The North Antrim MP said the “absurdity is compounded by the fact that MLAs will surrender control” without even knowing what future EU laws will look like. “It is a four year blank cheque to EU diktat”, he said.

“Of course, for nationalism the prize is that in these 300 areas Northern Ireland will be ruled by the identical laws as in the Republic, thus, easing the building of the stepping-stone all-Ireland economy they crave.

“For unionists, however, it is a dire step out of the United Kingdom.

“Equally, for unionists it poses the unavoidable choice of what now?

“The folly of returning to Stormont for the nothing of the Safeguarding the Union deal is made all the more obvious by this vote, because if that foolhardy step hadn’t been taken this vote would really have put it up to non-unionists as to whether they were going to vote for the continuing absence of Stormont or to reject that which was preventing its return, the Protocol. But, sadly, that leverage was surrendered and it is now unionists who are in the bind of living under foreign EU/ROI rule.

“Once Stormont accepts 4 more years of dismantling of the Union and continues blindly to operate that very thing, then recovery of the Union becomes even more difficult, if not impossible.

“Unionists should not be assisting the haemorrhaging of the Union, but to operate a Stormont under Protocal diktat is exactly what they will be doing.”

DUP peer Lord Dodds, among a small number of senior party figures who spearheaded opposition to the Safeguarding the Union deal and the party’s pre-election u-turn on the Irish Sea border, says “the nature of the proposed vote runs contrary to the very Belfast Agreement the protocol is supposed to uphold”.

“To deny a cross community vote by saying that this is a reserved matter really misses the point. Agriculture and the regulation of manufacturing are devolved matters. The rules are set down in European Union directives, but many are implemented through legislation in the Northern Ireland Assembly: they are devolved.

“The mechanism of approval is given to the Northern Ireland Assembly after four years of protocol implementation not at the outset when it should be happening”.

Lord Dodds says there is “not one example of a significant controversial issue in the Northern Ireland Assembly which is not based on cross-community voting or is not susceptible to being turned into a cross-community vote through the petition of concern… yet, on this most significant issue of all, it is to be a bare, simple majority”.

He added: “The rules and laws for a whole swathe of manufactured goods and agriculture products in Northern Ireland are now made in Brussels. No one at Stormont has any power to propose or amend or stop them. Nobody at Westminster likewise has any powers. How on earth can that be democratic?

“Yet incredibly many MLAs are happy that the people of Northern Ireland are left in this position of having no say or control over laws affecting the basics of the economy of Northern Ireland—laws that could be put in place in Brussels, and which could actually be injurious to the position of Northern Ireland? Nobody at Westminster and nobody at Stormont are able to have the final say”.