DUP - from the TIMES29 Nov 2018 22:05
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Twenty years ago the Democratic Unionist Party was the only mainstream political party in Northern Ireland that opposed the Good Friday Agreement.
Back then, the term mainstream had to be employed loosely to describe the DUP. The party was synonymous with its founder, Dr Ian Paisley, the firebrand preacher who also established the Free Presbyterian Church. It was located at the margins of the political spectrum, which in a deeply polarised Northern Ireland was quite an achievement.
In 1998, the much more moderate Ulster Unionist Party was the voice of unionism and, because of the Protestant majority, it was the most powerful party in Northern Ireland. The SDLP was the moderate nationalist party, representing the majority of the Catholic population.
Over time, the DUP and Sinn Fein displaced the two centrist parties. The DUP is now by far the larger of the two unionist parties and has come to represent mainstream unionist opinion. But Britain's vote to leave the European Union in June 2016 changed the political calculation in Northern Ireland in ways that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago.
In the last regional and general elections held in 2017, the two unionist parties did not command a majority of the vote for the first time. That cannot be attributed to the Brexit vote but it has significant implications for the position the DUP has taken in negotiations. The party, which has 10 MPs in Westminster, has said it will vote against the Withdrawal Agreement when it goes before the House of Commons on December 10. Arlene Foster, the leader of the DUP, has said she will not accept any agreement that would put Northern Ireland on a separate footing to the rest of the UK. This could be a pivotal moment in the future of Northern Ireland.
The Ulster Farmers' Union and business representative groups in the region, all of which would have been closely aligned with unionism in the past, are publicly supporting the withdrawal agreement. They have said that a no-deal Brexit would be a disaster for Northern Ireland. The Alliance Party and the Green Party, which are centrist and not aligned to either community, backed Remain in the referendum.
The DUP was the only party to campaign in favour of Brexit, in a province that voted to remain. There is a school of thought that if Mrs Foster had been a bit more strategic she could have sold the withdrawal agreement as a victory for her party. The DUP's original red line was that it would not accept a backstop that could potentially put a customs barrier down the Irish Sea. The backstop is now a UK-wide customs union. There are protocols in the withdrawal agreement that would involve regulatory checks on goods moving from Britain to Northern Ireland but there are already regulatory checks on livestock and agriculture products moving in that direction. What is proposed are additional light regulatory checks.
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