What sort of government is it that can lavish £61m on the GAA and £61m on football – when they only asked for £30m – but can’t open the cancer unit in Londonderry?

Is Stormont working for you? Education Ruaned, unemployment up 150% but a budgetary response which is shambolic, health underfunded, serial deadlock and squander of scarce resources of £400m on useless North/South bodies.

DETI has run out of capital money for new factories, but £21m is ringfenced for the IRA Shrine project at the Maze.

Ministers run, even mismanage, departments as fiefdoms utterly unaccountable to the Assembly or the people, as Murphy’s bungling of the water crisis demonstrated. Likewise Ruane has run amok through education, utterly unfettered by the Assembly.

We can’t go on like this. It’s time to shake up Stormont. All other parties offer ‘more of the same’. TUV offers the radical change necessary to make Stormont work for you, starting with re-establishing the fundamentals of democracy – the right to have an Opposition and the right to change your government. We’re not North Korea, we’re Northern Ireland!

So, why are we denied the right to an Opposition? Voters in the Republic changed their government, on 5th May Scotland and Wales may do the same, but on the same date we in Northern Ireland will be denied that right. Why, because of the absurdity of undemocratic mandatory coalition. It’s irreformable. It must go.

Instead, after an election – no party being big enough to govern on its own – parties should negotiate to see who can agree a programme on the key issues of the economy, health and education. Those who can agree – whoever they might be – and command the necessary Assembly majority, govern. Those who can’t – whoever they might be – fulfil the vital role of opposition. Only when such basic democracy is injected into Stormont will it ever work.

Then, we need to see it address the pressing issue of kick-starting our economy. Despite all the phoney promises of huge foreign investment, during the time of the outgoing Assembly, more jobs have been lost in Northern Ireland than has been the case for decades. With 60,000 people without employment, TUV places the restoration of our economic prospects as a priority.

Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK to fail to show any economic recovery and there is a simple reason for this. Decades of IRA violence has ensured that our private wealth-creating sector has been weakened and remains smaller than any other UK region,. Until we address this structural imbalance in a meaningful way, we will continue to lag in the slipstream of the rest of the UK.

Even worse, under the current failed Stormont, a North/South agenda for economic growth has been prioritised. The Irish Republic’s economy has crashed. Yet, Stormont seeks to grow our economy by linking it to the bankrupt South. This is madness.

TUV advocates the dynamic development of East-West links, plugging Northern Ireland into the more vibrant British economy which is still the world’s sixth largest! A coherent strategy of helping local business gain bigger shares of economic activity in England, Scotland and Wales is essential. Beyond that boundary, TUV advocates assisting Northern Ireland business gain market share in the emerging new economies around the world. DETI objectives and focus will need to change to achieve this.

TUV believes in boosting local employers by moving some basic functions from the public sector to the private sector. This has the twin advantages of sustaining overall employment numbers and reducing costs to the taxpayer, whilst creating a new generation of local entrepreneurs.

Those who join the all-Ireland harmonisation agenda by clamouring for the Republic’s rate of Corporation Tax ignore the resulting intolerable strain on the Block Grant causing even deeper cuts. Instead TUV believes the Block Grant needs to be recalibrated to take better account of the specific socio-economic needs of each part of the UK. Thus ‘the Barnett formula’, as Lord Barnett himself has conceded, needs revised and updated.

TUV believes that it is vital that the Stormont government must have clear economic priorities and that it must carry them out. Why should the only jobs that matter be those of the politicians at Stormont?

Help us change things for the better by voting TUV on 5th May.