Today the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland is required by law – (Section 4 (2) of schedule 6A of the Northern Ireland Act 1998, which was only recently inserted by the ‘Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland (Democratic Consent Process) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020’) – to deliver ‘notification of the start of the democratic consent process’ for the period 2025 to 2033 to the First Minister, the Deputy First Ministers of Northern Ireland and the Speaker of the Stormont Assembly.

In taking this step, the Government initiates one of the most remarkable and most disturbing procedures in the constitutional history of Northern Ireland and the wider UK.

The Government is requiring that, before the end of the year, Stormont votes on a proposition that is more controversial than any to have ever come before it in its 103 year history. A yes vote effectively involves MLAs:

Affirming the removal of Northern Ireland from the UK single market for goods and its insertion in an all-Ireland single market for goods – a necessary precursor to the creation of an all-Ireland state;

Affirming that in 300 areas the laws of Northern Ireland should be made by the Republic of Ireland and 26 other states, but not Northern Ireland (or the UK as a whole); and,

Renouncing the rights of the people of Northern Ireland to be represented in the legislature making the laws to which they are subject in 300 areas for a period of between 6 to 8 years.

No devolved legislature in the UK has ever had thrust upon it such a far-reaching constitutional decision.

What makes today’s events particularly alarming for unionists, however, is that this is to be a majority vote, as if the last fifty-two years never happened.

Unionists were not at all happy when we were told that, notwithstanding the fact that we were in the clear majority at Stormont, we had to forgo the conventional democratic benefits of majority decision-making supposedly out of regard for those who were not in the majority.

Yet now, precisely as soon as Unionists find themselves no longer with the majority of seats at Stormont, and a proposition comes up that constitutes the greatest existential threat to unionism, not just in the last 52 years but in the last 103 years, we are told that the purportedly neutral protections for minorities are to be arbitrarily dispensed with.

It is utterly shocking that the EU should be so ignorant of Northern Ireland that it should have made such a proposal and nothing less than appalling that our own Government should have agreed to it.

If the vote proceeds it will necessarily place the future of Stormont in jeopardy in that, if it is fine to make decisions pertaining to the most controversial proposition to come to Stormont in 103 years on a majoritarian basis, there can be no possible justification for not allowing majority decision making on all the other less controversial matters.

The truth, however, is that even if Northern Ireland was not a divided society and the Troubles, and preceding history had never taken place, the propositions inherent in the vote would in any event be profoundly wrong because they involve partly disenfranchising 1.9 million people. This is not something that should be passing without national debate and it is telling that the voices usually loudest to screech about procedural let alone democratic norms being abused are now completely silent when it’s actually happening.

This problem is further compounded by the fact that there is another way. If we exchange the Irish Sea Border placed by Michael Gove inside the UK for Mutual Enforcement in relation to the actual border, as provided by my Bill, then no one needs to be disenfranchised and the territorial integrity of the UK can be upheld.

The EU has sought to persuade people that the only way to deliver Brexit for Great Britain is by having an Irish Sea Border and denying Brexit to Northern Ireland. While this might create what is for them a convenient narrative, it is completely untrue.

Although it is possible to protect the integrity of the EU single market for goods with Northern Ireland added, and to protect the integrity of the GB single market for goods with Northern Ireland removed, through an Irish Sea border, it is also possible to protect the integrity of the EU Single Market for goods and the UK single market for goods through Mutual Enforcement without taking Northern out of the UK single market for goods and thus partly disenfranchising us.

It may well be that the EU prefers the idea of the Irish Sea Border to Mutual Enforcement but that does not make the option of Mutual Enforcement not exist. If the EU decides that its preference for the Irish Sea Border is so important that it won’t adopt the alternative then it will have to own the consequences of needlessly insisting on the largest disenfranchisement exercise of modern times, initiated in a jurisdiction where not allowing the value of the ballot box to be diminished is certainly more important than anywhere else certainly in the UK, and probably in most democracies in the world today.

I very much hope that the EU will not put themselves in this foolish and difficult position.

As ever, in all this things chiefly depend upon on our own habitually negligent Government. If they adopt my Bill, the European Union (Withdrawal) Arrangements Bill, which has its Second Reading on 6 December, then they can pull their destructive negation of democracy vote because democracy will be upheld (with all that this means for Northern Ireland), while protecting the integrity of both the EU single market and the UK single market for goods. I earnestly hope that they will seize this opportunity.