Hamilton’s message to North’s Assembly: time for grown-up politics

The sub-text of what the North's Minister of Finance, Simon Hamilton of the DUP, was saying in his budget statement to the Assembly was that now is the time for Stormont politicians to engage in grown-up politics.

The formal endorsing of the budget has yet to happen but, with the DUP and Sinn Féin already signed up to Hamilton's paper, the deal is effectively done. While the SDLP, the Ulster Unionist Party and Alliance Ministers voted against the budget last Thursday, the reality is that the DUP and Sinn Féin are the dominant parties and can dictate what the Executive implements.

In the weeks before Christmas the odds were against such a £10 billion budget being presented. But at the last moment political self-preservation and hard reality bit.

The budget permits the rest of the Stormont House Agreement to be rolled out, including devolution of corporation tax-setting powers and the creation of bodies to deal with the past, parades and flags.

The SDLP, the UUP and Alliance will put up reasoned arguments for opposing the overall budget but yesterday the suspicion was that their motivation was pre-election grandstanding, a point reflected in how muted the opposition to Hamilton’s proposals was.

Hamilton was able to find an additional £150 million to assist in areas such as health and education, the two highest spending departments, run by DUP and Sinn Féin Ministers. He found £27 million to ease the effect of welfare change.

He also started illustrating how some of the £2 billion in grants and loan-raising powers that the Stormont House Agreement provided to the Executive will be spent.

He is allowing for £200 million to be borrowed this year to start a major 10 per cent trimming of public sector numbers from 211,000 to 191,000 over four years.

Those 20,000 jobs and a predicted reduction in spending of £1.5 billion up to 2019 must have shown all the Assembly politicians that hard times lie ahead. The Stormont House Agreement saved the institutions from collapse but now they must learn to govern the way most democratic administrations function.

As Hamilton spelled it out: “Agreeing this budget was as big a test as any our administration has passed since restoration of devolution. No budget would have meant no Stormont.”