THE INITIAL REPORTS of a DUP heave against its leader of six years, Arlene Foster, may not have come as a surprise to many people who have been following Northern Ireland current affairs closely.
There have been rumblings of a leadership shake-up on and off for some time – spurred on by the fallout from how the DUP’s handling of Brexit effectively led to the creation of a border down the Irish Sea.
Foster bowed to the inevitable and confirmed this afternoon that she is to resign as leader at the end of June this year.
A mixture of factors led to her party deciding to move against her – including but not limited to:
The Brexit negotiations
Let’s remember that at one point, the DUP were Tory kingmakers.
After a miscalculation by Prime Minister Theresa May – who called a general election to increase her House of Commons majority in 2017, and instead lost it – the DUP’s 10 MPs ended up with a major say in UK affairs at a crucial time for Brexit negotiations.
During that time, the statements of DUP representatives mattered massively to the direction of Brexit negotiations: the Euroskeptic arm of the Tories, the ERG, backed the DUP to the hilt.
Famously, in December of that year reports emerged that a divorce deal between the EU and UK was all but certain – but Arlene Foster sent out a statement rubbishing the plan, and criticised that they hadn’t been consulted beforehand.
Their main qualm was over a Northern Ireland-only backstop (‘backstop’ being an early version of the Northern Ireland Protocol – essentially a mechanism to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland).
“There cannot be a border down the Irish Sea,” Foster told the BBC in an interview in October 2018.
“The red line is blood red.”
By the next month, there was a UK-wide backstop, which would keep the UK under EU customs rules, and there would be a regulatory border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain – so that Great Britain could leave the Single Market.
The DUP, who are in favour of Brexit, also rejected this proposal, saying they wouldn’t accept any GB-NI divergence.
The Northern Ireland Protocol
Compare these two rejected proposals under Theresa May to the one currently in place proposed by Boris Johnson: a regulatory border down the Irish Sea, and a half-and-half arrangement where goods going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland can avoid custom checks and costs if retailers can prove they are staying in the North.
To make matters more difficult for Foster, last year she was insisting her job was to implement the Protocol and make it work, while also highlighting potential benefits of the Brexit deal for Northern Ireland. It was a position that dismayed many within her party and saw her come under significant pressure to adopt a more forthright approach.
To unionists, who see their relationship and links with the Union – even a customs and regulatory one – as paramount to their identity and place in Northern Ireland, this was seen as a political failure by the DUP.
Promises by Boris Johnson – who gave a speech at the DUP party conference in 2018 saying that he would never put a border in the Irish Sea – and members of his government that nothing would change after Brexit have been strongly criticised by the DUP and by nationalists in Northern Ireland.
But this has left the DUP in a crisis of faith: loyalists and unionists are angry with their current status in Northern Ireland and the Union. DUP offices have been vandalised, and graffiti denouncing the Irish Sea border often references the party.
The failure over the DUP’s Brexit policy has left unionists questioning what its next political moves are ahead of the results of Northern Ireland’s Census results for this year being revealed – which may show that nationalists in Northern Ireland now outnumber unionists.
The Scottish elections on 6 May are also looming – and in Scotland there has been a growing proportion of the population in favour of independence since the Brexit vote in 2016.
Recent polls have suggested that resentment over the Irish Sea border could translate into an electoral battering for the DUP in next May’s Assembly election – undoubtedly a factor in the thinking of those who are backing the leadership push.
Earlier this year Foster’s predecessor Peter Robinson reflected the tumultuous choice the DUP faced, when he wrote the following in The Newsletter:
“If there is the stomach for defiance then, in truth, you cannot try to ditch the Protocol and administer it at the same time. How comfortable are unionists with that and the consequences that may flow from it?
Is the scrapping of the Protocol more important than the continued operation of the Assembly? A choice may have to be made.
It seems to be that by voicing their opposition to the Protocol, but continuing to implement it, Arlene Foster and her Stormont ministers have sealed their fate.
This was made even more apparent when DUP Stormont minister Diane Dodds attended a north-south business meeting last week with Tánaiste Leo Varadkar.
The DUP had been boycotting north-south engagements for several weeks in a form of protest against the Northern Ireland Protocol. This was criticised by Sinn Féin, the Alliance Party and the SDLP. Foster previously defended the missed meetings as a scheduling conflict.
A possible candidate for the DUP leadership, Edwin Poots, Stormont’s agriculture minister, today cancelled a meeting scheduled for today with Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue – a possible show of strength to the party fundamentalists that are looking to take a strong line on this issue.
Last week’s vote on gay conversion therapy
During the three-year-long powersharing hiatus, Westminster introduced same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland and liberalised its abortion laws.
While Foster was not responsible for the London-imposed changes her party had long campaigned against, they happened on her watch.
Foster’s abstention in a vote on a proposed ban on gay conversion therapy last week also appears to have further agitated the party’s fundamentalist grassroots.
The majority of her DUP Assembly colleagues voted against the motion, having failed to amend it to include specific mention of protections for religious practices.
That vote is further evidence of the tensions between Foster, a member of the Church of Ireland and former Ulster Unionist, and the more traditional Free Presbyterian wing of the DUP, who perceive her as potentially too moderate on some social issues.
There are other issues of friction within the DUP.
Many of her critics claim Foster has lost touch with her party’s base. They point to a perceived aloofness in dealings with other elected representatives and a sense that key decisions are made by a tight group of confidants and advisers.
In regard to powersharing with Sinn Féin, the deal to restore devolution included a DUP concession to legislate for Irish language protections.
Some hardline members are infuriated that the party faces the prospect of having to pass Irish language laws at Stormont at the same time as the Northern Ireland Protocol is, according to them, undermining their place in the UK.
For these DUP members, it all amounts to a slide towards a united Ireland that can only be halted by a more robust leadership team.
- With reporting from the Press Association and Dominic McGrath
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