Tory Love: Who the Heck are the DUP?

Theresa May’s new government relies on a Northern Irish political party that the average British voter would struggle to name, with a small gaggle of MPs that few people could identify in a line-up. So who are these powerful new king-makers, or rather queen-makers?

The Democratic Unionist Party has gone from the fringes of national politics to the most pivotal position in its 46-year history. Founded by the hard man of Northern Ireland’s Unionist politics, the fire-breathing preacher Reverend Ian Paisley, the DUP was the most hardline Protestant party during the Troubles but took on a more mainstream leadership role by taking part with its Catholic rival Sinn Fein in the Good Friday peace settlement.

There is a clear irony in the fact that after a campaign in which Labour leader Jeremy Corbin’s past links with Sinn Fein were cast of evidence that he sympathised with terrorists Theresa May has ended up having to rely on a party that has long had its own strong associations with armed paramiltary groups.

The party’s leaders say they could never support Corbyn because they believe he was an IRA sympathiser during the Troubles. Still deeply religious, the DUP opposes abortion and gay marriage, and has ensured that Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK where same-sex marriage is still illegal.

Some of its more prominent members have doubted the science of climate change. Unlike the Tory party it wants to see the maintenance of the “triple lock” protecting future rises in the state pension, and the universal winter fuel allowance. It also backs continued rises in the national living wage.

The potential friction between the DUP’s views and that of more progressive Tory members was quickly highlighted by Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson warning Ms May that she “needs to remember there are more Scottish Conservatives (13) than DUP MPs.” Ms Davidson, who is gay, sought  assurances from the PM that any leverage gained by the DUP would not be allowed to undermine gar rights.

The DUP is the largest party in Northern Ireland’s Assembly and is at the heart of a bitter stand-off that has seen the province without an elected government since January. That stand-off followed Sinn Fein’s decision to walk out of the power-sharing agreement in protest at a bungled renewable energy subsidy scheme that had been set up by DUP leader Arlene Foster in her capacity as Minister of Enterprise, Trade and Investment.

Theresa May’s government in Westminster is responsible for trying to bring the warring parties back together to form a new government, placing her in a peculiar position now that she is relying on DUP votes to win ballots on the floor of the House of Commons. That extraordinary position was brought about by her failure to win a working majority of the 650 MPs in the House of Commons. May does have a razor-edge majority of the 632 seats in England, Scotland and Wales, where the Tories won 318 seats.

The 18 seats in Northern Ireland take away that majority, as the province has its own parties. This time around it elected 10 members of the DUP, one centrist independent and seven Sinn Fein MPs, who always refuse to take up their seats at Westminster. With the Scottish and Welsh nationalists, Lib Dems and sole Green MP Caroline Lucas all inclined to back Labour over the Conservatives, May’s only hope of winning ballots on the floor of the House is to maintain the support of the DUP, which is famously effective at horse trading any leverage it has for benefits for its own supporters.

The party supports Brexit and says it wants the UK to leave the single market and customs union but also insists that it does not want to see a hard Brexit and a return to a “hard border” with the Irish republic. That position mystifies many observers, and one government adviser said yesterday that the DUP position is that “they want cake, cake, eating cake and having more cake.”

Leader Arlene Foster says that “what we want to see is a workable plan to leave the EU, and that’s what the national vote was about – therefore we need to get on with that. However, we need to do it in a way that respects the specific circumstances of Northern Ireland, and, of course, our shared history and geography with the Republic of Ireland. No-one wants to see a hard border, Sinn Fein talk about it a lot, but nobody wants a hard border.”

Foster, 46, trained as a lawyer but has been a life-long activist for the unionist cause dedicated to maintaining Northern Ireland’s place in the UK. When she was eight the IRA shot and wounded her father, a police reservist, and when she was a teenager her school bus was blown up.

Nigel Dodds, the party’s leader at Westminster, has also felt the murderous side of the IRA, having had his own office attacked in 2003. Rev. Paisley’s son, Ian Paisley Jr is one of the 10 MPs and was a prominent Brexit campaigner.  Fellow MP David Simpson has summed up his own opposition to gay rights by saying that “in the Garden of Eden it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

 

by Peter Wilson

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