Debate contribution: Budget Bill: Second Stage

Debate contribution by Mr Jim Allister KC on 19 February 2024.

MLA

Mr Jim Allister KC

Party at the time

Traditional Unionist Voice

Date

19 February 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

Budget Bill: Second Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4223703

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I commend Mr McCrossan for his compelling speech. I look forward to, in a few minutes' time, holding the "No" door open for him as he votes against this wholly inadequate Budget. Let us see. When I lift up the Budget Bill and turn to page 1, it is hard to escape the huge figure that appears there for our resources: £28,817,000,000 — it is good to be British, but it is never enough. That could say £38 billion, and there are Members who would demand more, particularly on the Sinn Féin Benches. They are past experts at spending everyone else's money. That is, in fact, their raison d'être, so that they can forever blame the Brits: "There is not enough money: blame the Brits". Sadly, there have been echoes of that from some on the unionist Benches. The DUP have joined in with their own Brit-bashing on the money front. Yet, here we are, back in Stormont, on the foot of a package that Members accepted as the way forward. They bought the package. I am sure that we are all familiar with the Latin phrase, "caveat emptor" — let the buyer beware. Did they? No. They bought £3·3 billion as the way of getting the keys to the House, and they are not through the door before they are demanding more and more. Of course, as I said, that is the only purpose for which some of them exist, because they could never acknowledge that being a part of the United Kingdom is financially beneficial or anything like it. You have to own what you bought into.

No, I do not. Let us be clear. I hear all the time in the House about Tory austerity and the terrible Brits who do these terrible things to us. As has been pointed out tonight, this is a Budget that builds in those cuts. They are now Sinn Féin cuts. Sinn Féin is now taking ownership of the denuding of our education service, our health service and everything that goes with it. Let us have a bit of honesty about where we are. There is no point in the First Minister and deputy First Minister speaking in front of impressionable four-year-olds in a playschool and equally impressionable BBC journalists, beating their chests and saying, "We'll not have water rates. We'll not increase rates. We'll not do this. We'll not do anything", when they accepted the very deal where the rubber will hit the road. The Fiscal Council has told you and anyone would have known that there is a cliff edge to that £3·3 billion. This is an Executive who are trying to blame everyone but themselves, when they are the people who bought into this. If they did not have enough money and if that mattered to them, why are they here? They would have been holding out. Some of them, of course, would be here for no money — £3, never mind £3 billion, would have done them, such was their anxiety to be here and to take ownership of Tory austerity, as they do tonight. Then, we look at the challenges coming down the road. A former Finance Minister of the House tells us in today's 'Belfast News Letter', that the Climate Change Act that the House previously approved will impose a charge of £2·3 billion. Was any of that factored into those wonderful negotiations? The House committed itself, in its folly, to all sorts of expenditure arising from a target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with a reduction in net emissions of at least 48% by 2030. A climate change commissioner has to be appointed, a public body has to be set up to scrutinise changes, and something else called a "Just Transition Commission" has to be established. That will all cost a phenomenal amount of money. Where was the negotiation to get that money? Where is that money coming from? It is all very well to say — we had this so much at the end of the last Assembly — "Let's push through all of these populist measures and populist private Members' Bills, but never cost them or worry where the money will come from." Of course, that is the typical Sinn Féin approach. In fact, the less money you have, the better, because the more you can blame the Brits. That is the mentality of the Minister and her party in the House. As we go forward, we will see more of the dysfunctionalism of the Executive. Indeed, we had a classic example of that last week, when the Education Minister came to the House to make his first statement. We may have been in the Chamber, but the Minister was not talking to us: he was making a presentation — a plea — to his Executive colleagues, including the Finance Minister. He set out that he needed £500 million or £600 million — I cannot remember exactly — to fix certain things. He did not come to make an announcement that, "This is what I've got, this is what I'm going to do with it and this is how I'm going to fix things", as you would expect from an Executive Minister. No, he came to the House to address the Finance Minister and his other Executive colleagues with bids for his Department. That is the classic dysfunctionalism of the Executive. We are only beginning to see it, and we will see it more and more as Ministers make their siloed presentations. This all comes down to a Budget that has locked in the cuts to date. The title deeds of those cuts have thereby been transferred from the wicked Secretary of State to the Finance Minister of Sinn Féin. That is where the ownership now lies, and that is where it will lie going forward. When public-sector workers and others find disappointment in what they are given and when our schools continue to be short of finance, let us put the blame where it belongs: on this Executive and on Sinn Féin in particular, who hold all the key economic posts. This is what they serve up to us tonight. It is little wonder that a minority of us refuse to vote for such a thing.

1,048 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Second assessment

Jev’s answers did not settle this record, so a second model, claude-opus-5-5, read the same text (without the MLA’s name or party) and gave its reasons on 21 October 2026. How the second assessment works

Verdict

Not flagged

Public interest or divisiveness

Mixed

Against the published rubric

The speech's main thrust is fiscal accountability: it argues that the Executive accepted a £3.3 billion package with a known "cliff edge", that the Budget "builds in those cuts", and that climate change commitments were not costed. It does repeatedly cast this through a constitutional lens, saying "it is good to be British, but it is never enough" and claiming one party exists "so that they can forever blame the Brits" because it could never accept that being in the United Kingdom is financially beneficial. Those lines attack a party's motives and constitutional position rather than portraying a community as a whole as hostile or illegitimate, and the same "Brit-bashing" charge is made against a unionist party. On balance the rubric's tests for identity framing, antagonism and grievance are not met as the main function.

Public interest or divisiveness

Most of the contribution scrutinises the Budget, the financial package, unfunded legislative commitments and how the Executive works, which is substantive opposition to a government spending plan. The recurring "blame the Brits" jibes and the claim that a party's "raison d'être" is grievance against Britain add constitutional point-scoring that feeds a familiar communal argument. Both elements are substantial, but the identity rhetoric serves a budgetary case rather than replacing it.

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 09:38 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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