Commenting on the Welfare Reform Bill last night Jim Allister said:
“What we are witnessing here today is the fact that the chickens are coming home to roost in the failure of mandatory coalition. For years, it has been promised to us as the panacea of good government and that it is the essential and only workable system of government. Yet today, it stands utterly exposed as that which reeks of failure. It is a collective failure of all the parties that support and sustain that unworkable system of government. Of course, as a diversion from that, the blame game has been in full swing today. One side blames the other. I suppose that, in moving the Bill today, the DUP wants to stop the music while the blame parcel rests on the lap of Sinn Féin, and so, largely, it does. One side wants simply to blame the other, instead of anyone in the House facing up to the reality that it is the system of government that has failed. The system that they continue to sustain is failing before our very eyes.
“It is the attempt to avoid that reality that has given rise to much of the rhetoric of today. Instead of this House facing up to the fact that a system that has been available and in operation for 17 years is fast coming to the inevitable point of implosion, they want to blame everything but the system and blame the parties within the system. It is the system that guarantees the logjam, and it is the system that guarantees the mutual vetoes, which have brought us to this point. Therefore, the inescapable conclusion is that this is a colossal, seismic and defining failure of the system. That is the point, and unless and until this House grasps it, we will continue to lurch from crisis to crisis.
“Of course, this has come against a backdrop of great deception. The deception, for example, that all this was sorted after long nights and long days. Mr Attwood was talking to us about, I think, the 40 days and 40 nights that were looming ahead of us. It was something like that, maybe more, that led to that great moment and great breakthrough of the Stormont House Agreement. The new dawn had arrived. The threat that was crippling the Executive over welfare reform had been removed. All had been resolved, and the first party out of the traps to endorse the Stormont House Agreement was Sinn Féin. Indeed, Mr Martin McGuinness told us it was a “remarkable achievement” and a “fresh start”. He said:
“And it is a fresh start we need to seize with both hands”.
“The same hands, on top of everything else that they are responsible for, that since have torn to shreds the Stormont House Agreement. That same party came to this House at the Consideration Stage of this same Bill and repudiated the consistent — one has to concede it is consistent — opposition of the SDLP and joined the DUP and others to sustain this very Bill that, tonight, they are going to kill.
“They had attained a remarkable achievement. They had made a fresh start. The fresh start did not last very long, because now they tell us that it was a false start. How they get themselves to that position is beyond the comprehension of most of us. Maybe it was the financial illiteracy that seems to plague them from time to time. Maybe they did think that £564 million was really the same as £1·5 billion, but they said that they had got a fresh start and made a remarkable achievement and that no one, now or in the future, was going to be less well off despite having a fraction of what it would take to ensure that. But, it was a fresh start. It was a remarkable achievement, whether or not, as I said, it was its notorious financial illiteracy at work.
“Finally, the penny dropped, whether it was that or it was the old Sinn Féin trick in negotiations of extracting what you can at any given point, you pocket what you have got, and you then come back for more. Has that not been the story of the last 20 years of what is called the peace process? Of course it has, and maybe it was encouraged in that view by some of the things that Mr O’Dowd talked about. It had forced the DUP from a parity position into negotiating for a lavish £564 million uplift by raiding the block grant to sustain welfare. Maybe it was encouraged to believe that, with a little more push, pocketing what it had got and bringing it back to the edge, it would get more. Maybe, this time, it has just pushed too far. We will see.
“Maybe it is just Sinn Féin advancing the political agenda that lies at the heart of everything that it does, because this party of Sinn Féin is not in government in Northern Ireland to give us good government and to make Northern Ireland work. This is a party that is quite happy to bankrupt Northern Ireland and to be self-fulfilling in its affirmation that Northern Ireland is a failure. How better to do it financially than to bankrupt it? That may well be the guiding principle that brings it to this point, but, whatever it is, we are at a point of reality check. It is a reality check that shows the welfare reform project in free fall and now hurtling towards irredeemable budgetary crisis.
“It is quite clear that, within days and weeks, the budgetary arrangements necessary to govern in this part of the United Kingdom will not be possible as a consequence of the killing of this Bill tonight. The free fall of welfare reform and the inevitable budgetary failure that is coming at us very fast raises fundamental questions about the sustainability and even the desirability of these institutions. What is a devolved Assembly and institution about if it is not about settling the budgetary issues in a manner where the people whom it governs can be governed effectively and efficiently? It is the very core of what devolution is about, and, if, as the Finance Minister has warned, we are hurtling towards the unattainability of a balanced Budget and that tonight will hasten that day, what is the purpose and the point of this institution if we cannot even settle a Budget? If you cannot settle a Budget, you cannot govern. It is as simple and as elementary as that.”