Boris Brexit proposal puts the DUP in control

For the Democratic Unionist Party, whose ten votes in Westminster are no longer mathematically relevant to the day to day survival of Boris Johnson’s government, this week could prove the most crucial in its history.

It knows it must simultaneously hold its nerve and its nose, counting on the fact that whatever happens on Europe in the next two weeks may not weaken Northern Ireland’s constitutional position as part of the UK, but actually guarantee its longer-term survival.

If the Prime Minister’s do-or-die proposal on Brexit, which would park the province half in and half out of the EU, is accepted by the 27, the party reckons it would only have to remain in purgatory for four years before returning to the UK’s full elysian embrace in 2025.

If, on the other hand, the move fails and Britain leaves with no deal on October 31, some form of hard border with the Irish Republic would re-emerge overnight, confirming the province as part of the Queen’s realm.

Win-win or what?

DUP politicians like to stress that they genuinely hope a settlement with Brussels will be achieved in the coming days. Like Johnson in reference to the 27, they regularly allude to the Republic as “our friends and neighbours,” and it is true that they have no wish to see relationships between the two parts of Ireland go up in smoke. But a clearly-defined Northern Ireland within legally recognised frontiers remains their preferred position, and this is what a no deal or hard Brexit would provide – at least for now.

Given the cool reception accorded the Johnson plan in Brussels and Dublin, the likelihood is that it will not survive European scrutiny. Indeed, there is a widespread perception in Ireland that the PM isn’t serious and is merely engaging in displacement activity aimed at putting the blame for the inevitable breakdown firmly on the shoulders of the EU.

But even if Brussels were somehow to run with the plan and endorse it at the upcoming European Council, the DUP would still be in a position to claim victory. As Nigel Dodds, the party’s leader at Westminster, told BBC Northern Ireland last night, the fact that the Stormont Assembly would have to approve the deal in the first place and then re-approve it every four years would give Unionists an effective lock on what happens next.

“We’re saying [the situation] is now in the hands of Unionist politicians and Nationalist politicians, and that’s a massive safeguard. We’re not dependent anymore on Westminster under these proposals … We control [the situation] now. Nothing can be done unless Unionists agree to it.”

There are several ironies at work here. Dodd’s confidence that Unionists would have the whip hand derives directly from the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace, if not reconciliation, to Northern Ireland in 1998. Under the terms of the GFA – which the DUP opposed tooth and nail until the Rev Ian Paisley tore up its fundamentalist hymn sheet and agreed to share power with Sinn Fein – simple majorities became a thing of the past. Any change that is deemed materially to affect the terms of the settlement cannot simply be voted on but must be agreed with cross-community support.

In this way, the minority – any minority – becomes, in effect, the majority.

To take the most extreme case, if the Nationalist population, which is poised to overtake that of Unionists within the next ten years, were to vote in favour of Irish unity, Unionists could withhold their community support and thus scupper the deal. In the case of NI remaining within the EU single market beyond 2025, Unionists could invoke the same cross-community provision and veto any extension.

The truth is, Unionists, if they feel their Britishness slipping away, could, by simply withholding their assent, bring the double-aspect experiment to an abrupt end.

It should be noted here that the DUP, which endlessly trumpets its requirement that Northern Ireland be treated exactly the same as any other part of the UK, is particularly pleased that its future, under the Johnson plan, would not be decided by the sovereign parliament at Westminster, but rather in the backrooms of Stormont, an assembly that in just over a week’s time will mark having not sat for a thousand days – a new world record for democratic dysfunction.

The party is not alone, of course, in its obduracy over Stormont. Sinn Fein has similarly given up on reviving devolution, preferring to concentrate on its drive for reunification. The two parties are poles apart on almost everything, not just Brexit, but abortion, same-sex marriage, policing, “legacy” issues, education and the status of the Irish language. Arlene Foster, the DUP leader, would undoubtedly like to return as First Minister, but she recognises that Sinn Fein would use its own cross-community support and power to stymie her political agenda. Ending the deadlock that began in January 2017 over the widespread abuse of a controversial energy incentive scheme, remains, ostensibly, a high priority for the British government in London. For the moment, however, it may be thought convenient that neither of Ulster’s Big Two can do anything other than register an opinion.

Outside of Northern Ireland’s two independent and antipathetic political bubbles, the government’s latest proposals have not gone down well. Business and farmers’ representatives have long lobbied in favour of a province-only backstop, which they say would enable local manufacturers and producers to look both ways at once, towards the UK and Europe. Now they are pointing out that instead of one border, there could be two, with checks on goods entering or leaving the Republic as well as on exports from the rest of the UK.

There is also mounting concern that customs posts, no matter how remote from the actual border, would immediately become targets for dissident Republicans. Such posts would have to be staffed and protected, initially by the police but ultimately, in the event of a terrorist revival, by the Army. It may be that this concern is exaggerated and that the threat is minimal, or at least containable. What is beyond dispute is that the fear is palpable and that the potential for a return to the bad old days is real.

On the micro-political front, while Arlene Foster now hails the Johnson proposal as “a serious and sensible way forward,” her smaller Ulster Unionist rivals – desperate to appear relevant to the discussion – have denounced the DUP’s relaxation of its red lines on the Backstop as an unwarranted “damascene conversion”.

And Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Fein’s leader in the North, says it would “drive a coach and horses through the Good Friday Agreement”. Colum Eastwood, leader of the moderate SDLP, expressed the view that the Prime Minister was “pretending” to be negotiating with the EU while actually preparing to leave without a deal. “This is frightening,” he added. “People in this part of the world are terrified.”

In Dublin, the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, told a near-empty Irish Parliament, that nothing the UK Government had put forward had made an agreed resolution of Brexit any more likely. “What we are hearing is not encouraging and would not be the basis for an agreement in my view. We do want there to be a deal; we do want there to be an agreement; and we will work until the last moment to secure an agreement. But we will not do so at any cost.”

Scepticism, then, on all fronts, even within the DUP, whose ordinary members and supporters are not quite clear what is going on.

But here’s a thought. What if the experiment worked? What if Ulster, as an annex of the EU, able, uniquely, to pivot between the UK and Europe, entered a golden age, causing the children of IRA men and Protestant militias to join hands in the streets? A bit far-fetched? No doubt. But would that change the equation, and would it make a united Ireland more or less likely? Or – always assuming the Stormont Assembly could be dragged out of storage – would existential angst every four years become the new institutional norm for the province’s perennially feuding factions? As ever, things in Northern Ireland may never be the same again. But then they never were.

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