Putting The D Into DUP?

We have all known her. The temp who came for a few weeks and stayed for ever. Arlene Foster is one such. And where has she come from? She was one of the "hardliners" who defected to the DUP from the UUP in protest at David Trimble's agreement to coalition with Sinn Fein.

They joined the DUP because they had nowhere else to go. But their leading light was Jeffrey Donaldson, erstwhile aide to Enoch Powell. The Reverend Martin Smyth was retiring anyway, but he endorsed the DUP rather than the UUP candidate to succeed him. If David Burnside had switched parties, then he might have kept his seat. Smyth and Burnside were also veteran integrationists, like Donaldson and his followers, including Foster. And Smyth, at least, was as much a veteran Radical Rightist as Donaldson, being a Monday Club stalwart. All of which is a long, long way from the DUP.

And so to Foster, of solidly integrationist and monetarist political background, but now for all practical purposes the Leader of the DUP and, under its banner, the First Minister of Northern Ireland. She is even a member of the Church of Ireland. A Conservative Evangelical one, as they tend to be in North Ireland; they tend towards Liberal Protestantism in the Republic. But even so, not even the Presbyterian Church of Ireland, comparable to the more conservative wing of the Church of Scotland, with some who relate more to the Free Church of Scotland. And certainly neither the Free Methodism of the Robinsons nor the Free Presbyterianism (not that it manifests too much Calvinistic theology or Presbyterian polity, unlike its unconnected Scottish namesake) of the Paisleys. An Anglican. A very conservative, very "Low" Anglican. But therefore an Anglican as Cranmer intended. She has said that one of her favourite books is the Book of Common Prayer, which, I confidently suggest, is used neither at the Robinsons' church nor by Paisley.

Are we witnessing an integrationist takeover of the DUP? In Foster's elevation, has it already come to pass? Wholesale "Thatcherite" economic policy would never work in Northern Ireland, which is why it was never attempted there. So in that sphere the Old DUP should be able to hold on to its working-class and rural populism, basically that of post-War British social democracy. There is no dispute over the moral and social agenda of the old-time religion. Nor over the cultural agenda of Ulster Protestantism, at least where Ulster-Scots is not concerned, and possibly even where it is. So the retention of economic populism looks like the price that the New DUP will have to pay if it wants the party as a whole to accept the key principle of the people who now seem to be running it, the principle for the sake of which they left the UUP: the government of Northern Ireland "as if it were any other part of the United Kingdom".

A principle the application of which, including the contesting of elections in Northern Ireland by all the mainland parties, would have precluded absolutely the grievances giving rise to the Civil Rights movement. Among so many other Troubles.

But for which mainland party could DUP supporters vote? Like so many other people in Northern Ireland and everywhere else, none. Until there exists throughout the United Kingdom a party which is economically social democratic, morally and socially conservative, and patriotically committed to the Union and to the Commonwealth, the latter to be joined as soon as possible by the Irish Republic, which enthusiastically renounced any claim to Northern Ireland more than a decade ago.