On June 8th we went to the polls to elect a new government. The old one was just weeks over 2 years old, 2/5ths of its way through a 5-year fixed term parliament. So why was an election needed? Because, said Theresa May on the steps of Downing Street on April 18th, she needed a strong mandate to negotiate BREXIT after last year's EU Referendum result.
So did the 2017 General Election result provide that? No it didn't! The PM managed to turn a 330 seat Conservative government from 2015 into a 317 seat Conservative result, losing 13 seats along the way and resulting in a hung parliament in which no party has a majority.
So, having been made to look silly by the voters, what does the PM do next? She touts around to find a small party that want to prop up her government. Labour won't do, as the second largest party with 262 seats (up 30 since 2015) they are now an opposition force to be reckoned with.
The LibDems who, having lost 49 seats in 2015 leaving them with just 8, made a small comeback and ended up with 12, are still suffering burned fingers from the 2010-15 coalition with the Tories, which saw their popularity plummet after supporting measures such as hiking university fees, so have no wish to repeat the experience.
The SNP (often referred to as tartan Tories) managed to lose 21 of the 50 seats they took in 2015, but as there are huge differences between the SNP and the Tories on BREXIT, the PM had no chance of making an alliance there.
So who does that leave? The Green Party? One MP and ideologically opposed to the Tories. Or UKIP who managed not to take a single seat at Westminster, so they are out of the running. That leaves just the Northern Ireland parties.
Now here's a problem: under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement in which (in 1998) peace was established in NI after decades of violence on both sides, both the UK and Irish governments are committed to remaining absolutely neutral in respect of NI politics. To do otherwise breaks the GFA and risks plunging NI back into the sort of sectarian violence which was rife from 1969 onwards. So concerned about breaking the peace agreement was the Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kennedy, that he contacted the PM to warn her about the danger.
So, the PM has a choice: protect the peace in NI by not doing a deal with either of the two NI parties that have seats in Westminster or make a deal and risk the peace and safety of citizens there. One of the two NI parties, Sinn Fein, has not previously taken up its seats at Westminster as a protest against both taking the oath to the British Crown and the division of Ireland (currently they have 7 seats); the other, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) does. Their 10 seats would prove valuable to the Tories as an agreement with them would just give the PM a working majority of 1 (326 is the winning level). Those of us over a certain age will remember the DUP during the Troubles as the party founded and led by Rev Ian Paisley.
In pursuit of this majority the PM sought talks with the DUP aimed at them providing support for her minority government. The DUP, realising that they had the PM over a barrel, have made this into a quite long and drawn out affair, reports indicating two steps forward one step back, until today, when it was announced that the Tories and the DUP have reached a confidence and supply arrangement agreement whereby the DUP will support the Tories in Westminster.
Why should this worry us? Well firstly, the DUP has a much harder line on many of the issues that are accepted in the rest of the UK but that they have managed to block in NI. For instance, the party has repeatedly vetoed marriage equality for same-sex couples in Northern Ireland and is associated with a string of homophobic comments, including branding LGBT people as disgusting and an abomination. They have also opposed changes to the abortion laws in NI which prevent women from having terminations even in cases of rape, incest or severe foetal abnormalities, claiming that their Christian values prevent support for such abortions. This makes abortion a criminal offence for women, and is a breach of human rights legislation. The DUP also support the teaching of creationism rather than evolution in schools, have a history of climate change denial, whilst issues such as HIV seem to be a mystery to them. Their track record in NI government leaves something to be desired too, as the green energy scheme introduced in 2012 which was budgeted to cost £25m actually collapsed earlier this year, having cost over £500m over its 5 year lifespan. More recently, during the 2016 EU Referendum, the majority of voters in NI voted remain but the DUP are strongly pro-leave, a situation which, it is feared, could further destabilise the peace process and lead to a hard border being reinstated between NI and the Republic of Ireland.
Now let's look at the voting figures: the Tories in the 2017 GE polled 13,636,690 votes, the DUP polled 292,316 votes. To elicit its support for the minority government, the Tories had to make a big concession to the DUP. Today's announcement is that the concession is by way of a payment of £1 billion for NI, which has been broken down by allocation in a publication available on the UK government website (which equates to a cost of £3492 per DUP vote). This from a government which has consistently stated there is no magic money tree to pay for essential services or pay increases for public sector workers. Welsh Labour leader Carwyn Jones expressed his disgust at the deal, whilst the Tory Scottish Secretary David Mundell who had previously stated that funding made to NI to facilitate the deal would unlock funds for Scotland too under the Barnett formula, now finds that it is now being said isn't the case. Will he stand by his earlier statement to block any settlement that does not follow the Barnett formula? We shall see.
Still to come is a possible legal challenge as it was reported on June 20th, that a legal team were preparing to apply for judicial review of Tory-DUP pact on grounds that it breaches the Good Friday agreement.
Meanwhile, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams has said that the agreement threatens the NI peace agreement and that "Sinn Fein will resolutely oppose any attempt to give preferential treatment to British forces, either in terms of legacy or the provision of public services." Another voice warning that a coalition with the DUP will put the fragile peace at risk was former Tory PM Sir John Major, who said, a deal with the DUP could risk alienating armed republicans and loyalists, and cause resentment in other parts of the UK if the government made promises to spend large amounts of public money. The PM has apparently ignored them both.
