The DUP is fast running out of options on what to do about the Windsor Framework.
According to a leaked Northern Ireland Office (NIO) briefing note seen by the Belfast Newsletter, some Stormont government departments could face budget cuts of up to 10%. The former Sinn Féin Finance Minister Conor Murphy told The View from Stormont programme on UTV that the looming cuts were ‘an attempt to “punish” the DUP for not forming an Executive, and that the most vulnerable in society would face the consequences of this’.
Regardless of whether there are grounds for this assertion, the so-called ‘punishment budget’ is interpreted by the DUP in the political context of calls by NIO ministers for the party to back the Windsor Framework and return to the Northern Ireland Executive as soon as possible. Indeed, in the wake of a speech delivered by Northern Ireland Secretary of State Chris Heaton-Harris at Queen’s University Belfast, the DUP’s Gavin Robinson said ‘the government must realise that getting the foundations right, supported by unionists as well as nationalists, rather than personal attacks and blackmail will restore Stormont‘.
With the Daily Telegraph mischievously running headlines like “Back my Brexit deal or face a united Ireland, Rishi Sunak tells DUP”, which the Prime Minister did not actually say in his own speech at Queen’s University Belfast, it would nevertheless appear that the economic and political costs of DUP intransigence are mounting.
However, close watchers of unionism – and the sectional interest variant represented by the DUP – will note how the party has always been impervious to threats of sanction and, instead, often chooses to batten down the hatches in service of its own narrow interests. I proved as much when I became the first person to reveal the DUP’s plan to pull down the institutions in the autumn of 2021.
Now, I can exclusively reveal that a source close to the higher echelons of the DUP has confirmed that the party has finally reached a fork in the road in its relationship with the Conservative Party.
Senior figures are said to be convinced that the Tories cannot be trusted on the matter of maintaining the union – not an uncommon DUP criticism over the past half century – and believe the party would be better off placing its collective faith in the Labour Party! Careful analysts on Northern Ireland will note that we have come a long way from DUP hostility to Labour when the party said it could not back a Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn who, Arlene Foster claimed, would ‘be hugely detrimental to the United Kingdom in terms of the break up of the United Kingdom’. It would appear that those at the top of the DUP now see a Tory defeat at the next general election as a real possibility and a decision has been taken to back Labour, with Sir Keir Starmer confirming, again in his speech at Queen’s University Belfast in January that he and his party would be ‘a good faith guarantor of the constitution and the principle of consent‘.
This new plan of quietly backing Labour, I am also told, is aimed at convincing the Labour Party to square the circle of Northern Ireland remaining inside the EU single market while Great Britain stays out by – and I cannot quite believe I am about to type this – leading the entire country back in. Closer UK-EU analysts would need to comment on the democratic and bureaucratic feasibility of such a move, though it does speak to a hypocritical rethink on the DUP’s part regarding Theresa May’s “backstop”, which they rejected – we might call this imagined future version “Backstop Redux” – or, perhaps, it is simply a concerted attempt at wishful thinking.
On a side note, the same source believes that the DUP is “finished with the Assembly”. They report that the only avenue open to the party now is not only to withhold their consent in terms of the Windsor Framework as the ultimate means of withholding consent on the institutions established by the Good Friday Agreement (1998). I have argued elsewhere how the DUP’s opposition to the original Agreement has governed its responses to Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol – however, I feel we must also see the party’s views on re-entering the institutions today in the context of their views on playing second fiddle to a Sinn Féin First Minister.
Although there is a perception amongst some loyalists that unionist apathy and indifference explains the loss of the DUP’s dominant ethnic status, that is not the complete picture. Recent research undertaken by the Northern Ireland Assembly has confirmed it is not the case of unionist votes having been lost as the vote having been fragmented, with the combined unionist vote remaining broadly similar to those cast in 2017.
Another strategic issue confronting the DUP, as I revealed in an earlier post on my blog, was the risk of a civil war brewing inside the party, with key factions moving quickly to set out their stalls on the Windsor Framework. In defusing tensions between factions, it would appear that the DUP has taken refuge in a form of self-preserving pragmatism. As a political party driven more by ideological fervour and tribal politics, therefore, the DUP is unlikely to find the the external wielding of sticks or the dangling of carrots a moderating influence on its strategic direction.
The truth of the matter is that the DUP has rarely acted in the interests of all the people of Northern Ireland and these latest revelations, if true, only confirm it. Until the unionist people decide that the time is right to return politicians who act in the interests of the greater number of people, we are condemned to witness the DUP kick the can further down the street.