SIR – I hope Vernon Bogdanor is right in saying that the Dunlop report on strengthening the Union, completed in 2019, is to be published at long last.
I was assured again and again in the Lords that it would appear before the end of 2020. Some recommendations, I was told, were being put into effect.
Why then the continuing secrecy on the part of a government that is supposed to be firmly committed to the Union? We have been cursed for too long by the policy of “devolve and forget”, as Professor Bogdanor says.
It is erroneous, however, to say that in the past “devolve and forget” in Northern Ireland “legitimised discrimination by a majority-ruled Stormont against the minority Catholic population”. Discrimination was practised, above all in housing, by both Unionist and nationalist local councils.