Peter Robinson popped up on the day before the election to tell unionists to give the DUP their first preference and “provide Jeffrey [Donaldson] with a powerful case for the necessary steps to be taken to correct recent wrongs”.
“Everyone knows that it is the vote of the DUP that the government will be watching,” he wrote in a social media post.
Robinson’s re-appearance was a reminder that everyone had been watching out for his Windsor Framework report.
The former DUP leader, now a party adviser, chaired an eight-person panel appointed by Donaldson to consult on the framework. Its report was submitted to the party leadership at the end of March but its contents have never been revealed and nothing has been heard of it since.
How powerful a case can you have if you will not say what your necessary steps are?
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An unprecedented feature of this election was Alliance standing up for health reform and bluntly informing voters they may need to travel further for care. This was doubly daring as there is a controversy over merging clinics in Alliance’s north Down heartland.
The party’s stance earned a monstering from the press and political rivals, yet reform has been executive policy for a decade, officially endorsed by all five main parties. Election results will be carefully analysed before anyone, perhaps including Alliance, risks such candour again.
There is little point restoring Stormont if the executive will only pretend to support difficult decisions. Given the length of waiting lists, it ought to be clear the choice is travelling further for care or travelling even further for private care.
There is no squeamishness about centralisation in the private sector. All Northern Ireland’s private hospitals are in Belfast, except one in Derry. Private patients are routinely sent to Britain for major surgery or specialist treatment.
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Stormont departments are still identifying cuts to meet the NIO’s punishment budget. This engineered crisis is causing needless damage and alarm but some of the proposals are a useful opportunity to rethink how public money is spent.
A good example is the 50 per cent cut to the Department of Education’s £5 million ‘shared education’ programme. Why spend a fortune to segregate children, then spend even more on joint trips and activities to try undoing the harm?
Although the department is legally required to encourage shared education, it does not have to do so through additional funding – it could make existing funds conditional on cross-community engagement. The formula used to allocate core budgets to schools already includes a ‘targeting social need factor’.
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The government has confirmed reports that “not for EU” labelling will be required on all British food products sold throughout the UK, rather than just British products bound for Northern Ireland. Foreign secretary James Cleverly said this is for “practical and philosophical reasons”, the philosophy being unionism.
Could it pave the way to a ‘necessary step’ for the DUP? In 2019, the UUP proposed creating a legal duty for companies to serve all regions of the UK equally. The party raised the idea again in 2021, alongside a proposal for “not for EU” labelling for the whole UK – no crystal ball was necessary to see where the protocol’s logic was heading.
It is unclear if such a duty could ever be practical, unless it had enough exemptions to be effectively meaningless. Printing separate labels is hardly the only sea border cost and ‘not for sale in Northern Ireland’ is an issue that predates Brexit: similar problems affects the Scottish highland and islands.
But the ‘philosophy’ might suffice for the DUP. As for stealing a UUP idea, that ferry sailed long ago.
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Civil servants have been considering how to overturn the Hospital Parking Charges Act, unanimously passed by the assembly last year in a final act of witless populism. No funding was attached to the Sinn Féin-proposed legislation and health trusts have no idea how to pay for it, as hospital car parks already require a subsidy.
The Belfast Telegraph, which broke the story, reports “senior officials have been quietly discussing how they could get rid of the law”.
Finding a loophole would be a more democratic option. The Act only bans charges for “the parking of a vehicle in a car park”. It would not prevent an entrance fee to drive onto hospital grounds, for example.
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Three years of alleged planning to pedestrianise Hill Street, the main street through Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter, have stalled again because the Department for Infrastructure says it does not have enough staff to run a consultation exercise.
Some of Belfast’s councillors sound incredulous at this explanation. The SDLP’s Carl Whyte has noted the department has 3,000 employees and would only have to spare one for a few weeks.
There was a rather obvious falling out between the department and Belfast City Council last year, first over safety issues around the new Ulster University campus, then over pedestrianisation of another street. Councillors subsequently accused the department of refusing to turn up to a multi-agency meeting.
A punishment budget is bad enough without officials going on a punishment sulk.
