What do the DUP actually want?

What does the DUP want? Can it ever be satisfied?

Well, now we know – or think we do. The DUP will agree to support the Government’s EU withdrawal bill, but only if it agrees to give Unionists a veto that would render its application to Northern Ireland null and void.

Instead of a consent mechanism, the party wants a denial, or revocation, device, which it would use at the earliest opportunity to ensure that NI would leave the EU on “exactly the same” terms as the rest of the United Kingdom.

The fact that this would impose a hard border in Ireland doesn’t bother Nigel Dodds, the leader of the DUP at Westminster, or his colleague Sammy Wilson. A hard border, defining the province as an integral part of the UK, is what they have always wanted. It is the reason they got into politics in the first place.

The party’s fallback position only serves to confirm this. According to reports, the DUP might even vote for the Labour Party’s expected amendment to the withdrawal bill that, if adopted, would keep the entire UK within the EU customs union.

Yes! That Labour Party – the one led by Jeremy Corbyn, the good buddy of Gerry Adams and long-time believer in Irish unity.

As Dodds said of the originally proposed Northern Ireland-only backstop, “If the choice is between a bad deal and remaining, then the Union comes first”.

Two weeks ago, in reference to Boris Johnson’s now-defunct Brexit plan – the one that would have given Unionists the power to reject a half-in, half-out status for NI – Dodds was more than happy to support the Government. The requirement that a majority of Unionists and Nationalists in the Stormont Assembly would have to approve joining the mechanism in the first place and then confirm remaining within it every four years, meant, said Dodds, that nothing could be done unless Unionists agreed to it.

Europe could make as many demands as it liked, Unionists would not have to go along with any of them. Brexit could proceed without the backstop, and if the powers-that-be in Brussels didn’t like it, they could go whistle.

This was never going to fly. And it duly didn’t. Last week, the Johnson plan was replaced by a deal under which a Northern Ireland-only backstop would be installed without anyone’s prior approval and with subsequent endorsements achieved not via the cross-community mechanism but by way of a straight-up-and-down vote at Stormont.

Yes! That Stormont – the one that hasn’t met since January, 2017, the one that is sitting today, for one day only, without Sinn Fein, in order to ensure that “exactly the same” abortion laws that apply to the rest of the UK are not imposed on Northern Ireland.

Dodds, previously in smug mode, was nonplussed. Unionists had been “shafted,” he told Parliament. The Tories had betrayed them. The backstop would be installed without so much as a by-your-leave and could not be ended without the agreement of Nationalists, which, needless to say, would not be forthcoming.

Sammy Wilson, the party’s principal attack dog, was in no doubt of the significance of what was happening.

“In Northern Ireland,” he told Saturday’s special Commons sitting, “there is a mechanism for dealing with sensitive issues. It is enshrined in an internationally binding agreement. That mechanism, because of the sensitive nature of politics in Northern Ireland, states that any controversial issue has to be decided by a cross-community vote. That part of the Belfast agreement, which is so sacrosanct in this House and to those who negotiated it, has now been torn out … we will be tied in to an arrangement where the laws for Northern Ireland will be made in Brussels. The British Government will have no input. The Stormont Government will have no input. So where will the focus of attention be for industry, lobby groups and politicians in Northern Ireland? Dublin! We will move towards a united Ireland.”

And so we come to the nub of the matter. Wilson, like Dodds, like Arlene Foster, like the entire Unionist establishment, is concerned not with customs provisions and market access, whether to England or the EU, but solely with the prospect of Dublin taking over from London as Ulster’s go-to capital.

This is the stuff of Unionist nightmare. The DUP, which could lose two of its ten seats at the upcoming general election to the pro-Remain Alliance Party, likes to conflate Unionism with Northern Ireland as a whole, making little or no reference to the emerging nationalist majority. But they are kidding themselves. Nationalism’s advance is taking place in spite of the refusal of Sinn Fein’s seven MPs to take their seats and despite the current absence at Westminster of more moderate, pro-Remain parties. The higher Catholic birth-rate, combined with an increase in the number of younger Protestants seeking new lives elsewhere, is doing the Republicans’ work for them. The DUP can stamp their feet all they like; they know that demography, not demagoguery, is what will ultimately decide the future.

In the meantime, the party – which largely eschews “English” values – has to take comfort where it can find it. The fact that the entire withdrawal agreement, so painfully negotiated by Johnson and his team, would automatically fall without the Northern Ireland protocols has become its only workable means of evading, or at least deferring, history. Having lobbied hard for the UK to get out of Europe, it now believes that the best way to achieve its objective – Northern Ireland as a clearly defined territory of the UK –is either to collapse the withdrawal bill entirely or else to vote with Labour and keep the whole of the UK in a half-way house.

What Unionists must come to accept, however, is that they are not the only ones willing to play rough. If they ask the Tory Party to choose between leaving the European Union and holding on to the Union with Northern Ireland, they should not be surprised if the answer does not come down in their favour. A month or so from now, with the political arithmetic expected to shift in his favour, Boris Johnson will be free to shuffle off what passes for his Unionism and to concentrate on his core constituency: England. The last thing he wants is for the DUP to hang around his neck like the Millstone of Damocles for as long as he occupies Downing Street.