Newton Emerson: Abortion referendum puts DUP conservatism in the spotlight

One year ago this month, the DUP embarked on post-election talks with the Conservatives on a confidence-and-supply agreement.

Liberal England was aghast at the provincial barbarians at its gates and for weeks heaped derision on the unionist party that was framed by almost universal media hostility. The bans on same-sex marriage and abortion in Northern Ireland became totemic.

We think of Northern Ireland politics as abusive, but it is an ambassador’s reception compared with what the DUP endured last June and July. Its representatives were under no illusions as to how they were perceived in Britain – that is why the Tories could not palm them off with flattery – yet party figures were taken aback by the scale of the vitriol.

The DUP has been through this before, under far more challenging circumstances, and all it had to do was sit tight and wait for the subject to change

One image came to sum this up. On the day of London’s Pride parade, protesters attached balloons to a “F*** the DUP” banner and lofted it over Trafalgar Square.

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I was in London that weekend and saw the crowd leave Trafalgar Square but a different image sticks in my mind. Emerging from an Underground station, I looked up to see an enormous rainbow flag flying over the Bank of England. I burst out laughing. There were rainbow flags on every official building, itself a striking fact, but this one was so unusually huge and the £1 billion price of the deal with the Tories was still causing so much fury that it could only be seen as another “F*** the DUP” banner.

Then July turned to August and the fury fizzled out. This must be borne in mind as the party faces renewed horror over its social and religious conservatism, provoking a Westminster debate on abortion on Tuesday. The DUP has been through this before, under far more challenging circumstances, and all it had to do was sit tight and wait for the subject to change.

Avoiding social policy

Sitting tight did not mean sitting on its hands. The DUP was careful to isolate the confidence-and-supply arrangement from social issues in Northern Ireland. It also took an informal decision to avoid social policy in Britain. The party’s more excitable critics had warned it would meddle in such issues at Westminster, so not meddling was an easy way to make the fuss of the early summer seem overblown.

There were no serious demands at the time of the deal for the British government to intervene directly in Northern Ireland over abortion and same-sex marriage, even in the absence of Stormont. The social policy border down the Irish Sea was understood to work in both directions.

Labour backbenchers ran individual campaigns, some of which predated the deal and most of which escalated afterwards. Momentum built around abortion: NHS funding was extended to Northern Irish women travelling to England and Wales, inspiring a similar move in Scotland. But these victories were constrained to action in Britain.

Meanwhile, Brexit was dominating discourse to the exclusion of all else and the DUP’s national profile came to be seen largely in this light.

The accusation now levelled against the DUP over Brexit and social policy – that it wants Northern Ireland to be identical to Britain in some ways but different in others – is the very definition of the UK’s devolution settlement. Complaining about this when it suits is opportunistic at best, idiotic at worst.

Waiting it out

The DUP’s conservatism is only back in the spotlight because of the Republic’s abortion referendum. The party clearly intends to sit tight and wait this out again. Brexit will continue diverting attention, the British government has proven it has no willingness to upset its unionist partners and liberal England is facing not barbarians at its gates but merely a matter of embarrassment. If reforming abortion in Northern Ireland is a matter of urgency, why has it taken a change in the Republic to bring it to a head?

The DUP can still count on an intense reluctance across Westminster to override devolution. In Tuesday’s debate on abortion, MPs from all sides expressed a preference for Stormont to address the issue, although it is now 18 months since the assembly collapsed, with no sign of its restoration. Even those MPs most committed to reform do not want it imposed from London.

The campaigns being run within Northern Ireland for abortion and same-sex marriage are of a notably high standard. They have proposed workable solutions, respected religious conscience and avoided monstering political opponents. They speak for social changes happening in Northern Ireland as much as anywhere else. Soon enough the DUP will regret dismissing them. But for now, with devolution in limbo, the DUP is mainly facing the same sort of people it faced last summer. So of course it will see them for what it felt they turned out to be: just a bunch of London balloons.