Between the devil and the DUP: the Democratic Unionist Party and the politics of Brexit
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Between the devil and the DUP: the Democratic Unionist Party and the politics of Brexit Mary C. Murphy1 · Jonathan Evershed1
© Springer Nature Limited 2019
Abstract The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) gained an unexpected foothold at the heart of the British political system following the 2017 UK general election. Political arithmetic compelled the then Prime Minister Theresa May to enter a Confidence and Supply Agreement with Northern Ireland’s ten DUP MPs in order to shore up her minority government. The timing of the DUP’s positioning at the UK’s constitutional centre coincided with the early phase of the Brexit process and afforded the small Northern Ireland political party a degree of influence as the UK struggled to agree the terms of its departure from the EU. This article provides some analytical clarity as to how and why the DUP unexpectedly came to play a leading role in Brexit’s complex and dramatic political theatre. Drawing on interviews with senior DUP figures, opposing political parties, civil servants and political commentators, this article demonstrates the hollowness of the DUP’s Brexit position, and points to ways in which the party’s influence over the UK’s approach to the Brexit negotiations undermined relationships in Northern Ireland between unionists and nationalists, between North and South (on the island of Ireland), and between Ireland and the UK. The research reveals that Brexit has precipitated (a return to) a disruptive Unionist politics which is defined by a profound and destabilising ontological insecurity and a fear of being ‘sold out’. Keywords Brexit · Backstop · Northern Ireland · Democratic Unionist Party
* Mary C. Murphy [email protected] Jonathan Evershed [email protected] 1
Department of Government and Politics, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland Vol.:(0123456789)
M. C. Murphy, J. Evershed
Introduction Signed on 26th June 2017, the Agreement between the Conservative and Unionist Party and the Democratic Unionist Party on Support for the Government in Parliament (Cabinet Office 2017) was a matter of unanticipated necessity for then Prime Minister Theresa May; the consequence of a Parliamentary arithmetic that had been entirely unpredicted when she had called the General Election two months earlier. The deal represented a surprising and unprecedented opportunity for the DUP to exercise power, including the power of veto, in the constitutional centre (see Tonge 2017; Tonge and Evans 2017). This was nowhere better demonstrated than in December 2017 when, at the behest of DUP party leader Arlene Foster, May was forced to delay and hastily renegotiate the provisional terms of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. An initial draft of the EU-UK Joint Report on the progress of phase one of the Brexit negotiations had proposed a differentiated settlement for Northern Ireland and ‘regulatory divergence’ across the Irish Sea which the DUP claimed Unionists could not countenance (Boffey et al. 2017; Connelly 2018a). All subsequent attempts on the part of May’s governm
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