Unionism in general and the DUP specifically benefited from the confidence and supply arrangement the latter’s Commons team of MPs negotiated with then British Prime Minister Theresa May to keep her minority Tory Government in power.
Ironically, given the ongoing Conservative civil war and the financial allegations scandal which has engulfed the Scottish National Party north of the English border, Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour could be on the brink of getting their hands on the keys to 10 Downing Street, a feat which seemed next to impossible when ex-Tory PM Boris Johnson delivered an 80-seat plus majority at the last Westminster General Election.
Labour’s Commons foundation was always built on the guaranteed dozens of seats coming from Scotland, but since the SNP surge a few years ago, the majority of Scottish constituencies are no longer regarded to go red.
Predictions are already starting to emerge that the next General Election, due in 2024, could produce a hung Parliament - and this could once again land the DUP front and centre.
If the DUP can wangle a confidence and supply arrangement with May and her Tories, the DUP could find itself with enough MPs to dangle the keys of 10 Downing Street in front of Sir Keir.
And such a move would not require a major ideological shift for the DUP. Indeed, such a move would see the party returning to its original working class Loyalist roots which its founder, the late Rev Ian Paisley, envisaged when he launched the DUP in 1971 following the previous year’s election victories for ‘The Big Man’ at Stormont and Westminster.
Paisley senior’s success in the early Seventies was that he gave a political voice to two sections of the Protestant community which had been largely muted by the ruling upper middle class and aristocratic Unionist Party.
These were the Loyalist working class and evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. Paisley’s embryo Protestant Unionist movement in the late Sixties and in 1970 was essentially a working class organisation.
Strip away the anti-republican rhetoric and Hell-fire sermons against Catholicism, and the Protestant Unionists and DUP were Loyalist Labour movements.
‘Big Ian’s’ big success initially in Stormont’s Bannside constituency and Westminster’s North Antrim seat a matter of weeks later was based partly on Paisley’s ability to get indoor toilets installed in working class housing estates.
Right up until the late Sixties, the crude ‘slop bucket’ was a key feature of many working class Protestant housing developments across North Antrim.
The fundamentalist Paisleyite rhetoric covered the fact the DUP was a bread and butter movement; a soft socialist party building a power base among the Loyalist working class. The DUP’s original ideology was essentially a political shotgun marriage between the Hard Right stance on the Union, coupled with a Soft Left agenda on bread and butter issues.
The DUP overtook its rival UUP in there 2003 Assembly election by eating into the middle and upper class pro-Union vote which traditionally had been the electoral foundation of the Ulster Unionists.
This was a strategy which eventually saw the DUP become a middle class mirror image of what the UUP had been in 1986 under its then boss Jim Molyneaux.
This influence by the UUP middle class continued after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement when a considerable number of key Ulster Unionists defected to the DUP from the Ulster Unionists, including current boss Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, past leader Dame Arlene Foster, and Peter Weir, now Lord Weir.
While Sinn Fein has been able to attract middle class Catholic voters to the party whilst at the same time retaining support in its working class republican heartlands, the DUP in trying to soak up middle class Unionist voters was perceived to be disconnecting from its traditional working class Loyalist power base.
But compared to the DUP’s soft socialism, other Left-leaning pro-Union movements, such as the Progressive Unionist Party tended to pursue a Hard Left, even an openly Marxist agenda.
Ideological discussions between the PUP and the political wing of the Official IRA, the Workers’ Party, dismayed the fundamentalist wing within the DUP. Indeed, such fundamentalist Christians tended to brand the Belfast-based PUP as the Shankill Soviet, believing such pro-socialist Unionists were more communist than unionist.
But if Starmer can purge the Labour Party of the Hard Left who once championed former Hard Left leader Jeremy Corbyn, then the DUP could fit quite snugly ideologically into a pact with Labour to make Starmer PM.
And just as the DUP had a cash list for Theresa May under confidence and supply, as well as a cash list for Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris to kickstart Stormont, so too, in the event of a hung Parliament or a Labour Government with a wafer thin majority, the DUP must have its shopping list fine-tuned either in terms of a cash boost or dumping the concept of a border poll, no matter how many seats Sinn Fein wins in the next Dail election in Dublin.
Indeed, in the past I have written about the need for a socialist alternative for Northern Ireland - and I don’t mean a looney left commie movement!
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Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter Listen to commentator Dr John Coulter’s programme, Call In Coulter, every Saturday morning around 10.15 am on Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. Listen online. |
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