A Union of Equals

That is, of equal citizens.

The Union with Northern Ireland is a protection racket, with all the parties in on it in the way that all of the Mafia's Five Families are in on it in New York.

"We'll start blowing each other up again [or, at the very least, "People over here will start blowing each other up again"], which might very well spill over into blowing you up again, if you don't give us whatever sum of money we happen to demand."

Again I say that the DUP ought to be on every Question Time panel for as long as this arrangement holds.

The SNP is on every week, yet it runs nothing outside Scotland. The Hundred Million Pounders of the DUP should be made to account for themselves Thursday by Thursday, from Gateshead to Gloucester, and from Aberdare to Aberdeen.

Forget any DUP policy with which you might happen to agree. It has absolutely no interest in trying to introduce that over here.

It has undertaken to support the Brexit legislation even though, officially, no one yet knows what that legislation is going to say.

The logic of the DUP's position on everything specific would in fact have been "reluctant Remain", and that would have been its line if the referendum had happened even a couple more years after the death of the Big Man.

The DUP is now a bigger brake on Hard Brexit than even the 60 Conservative MPs who intend to join 50 Labour ones in voting against both of their respective front benches and manifestos if withdrawal from the Single Market and the Customs Union were ever to be put before the House of Commons.

The DUP, you see, is the guarantee that no such withdrawal will ever be so put.

An entire generation in Great Britain now sees the DUP as the enemy in Northern Ireland, so that, if it thinks about Jeremy Corbyn's past at all, then it thinks that he must have been basically on the right side, because he was on the side that was opposed to the DUP.

The problem, however, is that that view is not based on anger at the protection racket while austerity burns on in the tower blocks of England.

Instead, it is based on the DUP's attitude to homosexuality, an attitude that it has no desire to seek to ship across the Irish Sea.

Still, if David Davis never did become Prime Minister, then be in no doubt that his vote against same-sex marriage would be the reason why not.

For that reason, he is less likely ever to attain the Premiership than Corbyn is.

A history involving Sinn Féin is one thing; scarcely worth mentioning, even.

But anything less than total historical soundness on "LGBT issues" is an absolute bar to the Leadership of any party.

Well, any party apart from the DUP.