Opinion

Brian Feeney: It is the DUP's misguided actions that will deliver a hard border

Brian Feeney

Brian Feeney

Historian and political commentator Brian Feeney has been a columnist with The Irish News for three decades. He is a former SDLP councillor in Belfast and co-author of the award-winning book Lost Lives

Brian Feeney
Brian Feeney Brian Feeney

Lord Adonis says the DUP want the hardest Brexit because all they want is a hard border for cultural and political reasons, note not economic. The great advantage for them is that they can blame the British for the outcome. Lies, all lies, say the DUP while hurling personal abuse at Adonis.

Of course he’s right. When did the DUP stop wanting a border as hard as possible? After all, at one stage Peter Robinson wanted a fence, extolling the Israeli model he visited at the illegally occupied Golan Heights. The evidence supports Adonis. The DUP’s sole contribution to the Brexit negotiations has been to use every opportunity to block the only chance of avoiding a border by resisting any and every attempt to devise a backstop.

It was the DUP which raised the hare that the north staying in the customs union and single market had ‘constitutional implications’. Not a bit of it. Britain gave Hong Kong back to China in 1997. Beijing is sovereign and decides who runs Hong Kong but Hong Kong still has separate customs and tax arrangements. There are several examples of countries which have more than one tariff and tax system. Besides, all agricultural produce coming into the north is already checked at the ports.

During World War II patriotic, jingoistic unionists had no objection to the north not having conscription like, all together now, ‘the rest of the UK’. No one remember any unionist begging, ‘Conscript us too.’ Furthermore you had to have an ID card to travel to Britain during the war and for some years afterwards. Any constitutional implications there? However do you smell any hypocrisy?

Despite the DUP and their friends among the more repellent Brexiteers successfully holding up progress on the backstop which without question would be economically and socially beneficial to everyone in the north, the pathetic Theresa May still indulges them. Truly as George Osborne said last year she is a dead woman walking. Her moderate, sensible MPs watch with astonishment as she staggers on absorbing the blows and ridicule of the ideologues in her party and their DUP spear carriers.

That’s what she was doing her last week. She knew she would achieve nothing except please the DUP and reckoned the humiliation was worth it. Can you imagine a two and a half hour dinner with that lot? That’s one occasion when you wouldn’t want to be a fly on the wall. You’d have dropped off with boredom. Famously when she was home secretary May was known to journalists covering parliament as ‘the worst lunch in Westminster’. Awkward silences, robotic answers, empty soliloquies, blank recorder. Now add to that the wit of the scintillating Foster and the dour Dodds. What a sparkler that dinner must have been.

Only Arlene Foster, perhaps not for the first time, didn’t seem to understand what she was doing inviting May to Fermanagh. Who did she think she was representing? Not the 58.6 per cent of Fermanagh/South Tyrone voters who voted Remain in a 68 per cent turnout. In fact what the DUP were doing last week was a microcosm of what they’ve been doing since June 2016 and that is misrepresenting the people of the north. By doing their damnedest to prevent a backstop and thereby ensure a hard border the DUP are damaging the futures of everyone in the north. Creating a border is all they want.

At no point have they presented any plans to replace the EU subsidies which pay 87 per cent of farm income here or the Peace IV funding which supplies millions of pounds to the north. What has the DUP proposed should be done after 2020? Nothing. What have they asked the British government to do? When you look, you find the DUP has no independent positions on any Brexit issue but one. They pathetically parrot the latest line Theresa May squawks, including about the Chequers white paper which Depooty Dodds supported before his friends left it in tatters on the floor of the Commons. No doubt Depooty Dodds is waiting for Theresa May’s next pronouncement on Chequers so that he knows what line to take.

The only specific action the DUP has taken is to ensure a hard border.