Newton Emerson: DUP defensive cunning misses big picture of being laughed out of court

In 2015, towards the end of a previous Stormont crisis, then Democratic Unionist Party leader and first minister Peter Robinson found himself in a corner. He had threatened to bring down power-sharing if devolution was not suspended over an IRA murder. However, the British government had called his bluff. So the DUP commenced an arcane series of rolling resignations, with ministers standing down for a week, resuming their posts just in time to avoid triggering an election, then standing down again.

It was a classic DUP solution under Robinson’s tenure, stretching laws and promises to the limit to construct an elaborate face-saving mechanism.

But the DUP leader had misjudged Northern Ireland’s sense of the absurd. The resignations were promptly christened “the hokey cokey” and became a joke from which Robinson’s authority never recovered. He announced his retirement from politics two months later.

There is an unmistakable echo of the hokey-cokey in the DUP’s offer of a Brexit deal, and not just because it has one leg in the single market and another out of the customs union. There is the same narrow focus on defensive cunning, while missing the big picture of being laughed out of court. Each part of the offer can be justified in terms of a red line or a trade-off but the whole thing adds up to an unworkable mess.

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This is proof the DUP is serious about the deal, even if British prime minister Boris Johnson is not.

Strident terms

The DUP has manoeuvred itself into advocating a regulatory sea border, which until now it has denounced as anathema to the union. It has presented this as the result of its unprecedented influence over the British government. The DUP would not have exposed itself to the inevitable criticism from other unionists and the unease of its supporters if it believed it had a better option. Of course, many other Brexit outcomes are possible but this may be the last chance the DUP has to claim it shaped a deal in unionism’s interests. It has chosen to offer this deal and to defend it in increasingly strident terms as the ridicule has mounted.

This may be the last chance the DUP has to claim it shaped a deal in unionism's interests

DUP leader Arlene Foster has been christened "two borders Foster" by the Ulster Unionist Party, which also coined the term hokey-cokey. How much longer will her authority last?

Johnson's sincerity in seeking a deal is a separate if related issue. To stretch the usual metaphor, rather than waiting to be thrown under the bus the DUP has decided to get on board and take a turn at the wheel. Johnson may or may not have permitted this in bad faith but the DUP must face its voters regardless. It all points to a genuine assessment by the party that this is the best it can do.

Where the DUP clearly feels it has succeeded is in requiring Stormont consent for single market alignment.

There is an echo here of another aspect of the DUP’s negotiating style, where it tries to open loopholes or lay traps by focusing on technicalities. The DUP is all letter and no spirit, which seems appropriately Presbyterian. A pertinent example is the 2006 St Andrews Agreement, when the DUP appeared to sign up to an Irish Language Act while in fact agreeing to nothing. As this is now the crucial issue in the Stormont deadlock, the DUP’s ploy turned out to be too clever by half. The same could be said of the deal that resurrected Stormont after the 2015 crisis. Known as Fresh Start, it clobbered Sinn Féin to an extent where power-sharing was doomed to collapse again.

Whip hand

The DUP obviously thought it could pull off a similar trick with its Brexit offer. Stormont input into the backstop had been raised by Johnson's predecessor Theresa May and there had recently been some positive signals on the concept from the European Commission. Where May's proposal would have given nationalists a veto on divergence from the EU, the DUP has sought to reverse the polarity of how Stormont's cross-community petition would operate to give unionists the whip hand.

The DUP is not playing in the Stormont little league any more

However, the DUP is not playing in the Stormont little league any more. There was no chance of its Brexit ruse going undetected and in any case the unionist veto is too central to its hopes of selling its deal to the unionist electorate. Once everyone immediately spotted what the party was up to, it was in no position to downplay it. Observers who say Stormont consent might be tweaked to salvage the deal are missing the point. As far as the DUP is concerned, a unionist veto is the only win in a deal that nobody else can see any advantages to whatsoever. Without it, the DUP has simply acceded to a sea border after saying it would it never do so.

Or as the UUP might put it, it has done the hokey-cokey and then turned around. And that’s what it’s all about.