Next Thursday the Westminster parliament goes into recess. There isn’t going to be the legislation Jeffrey Donaldson has been demanding to fulfil the promise he believes the British made in the New Decade, Same Approach con job in January 2020 to guarantee the north’s place in the UK’s internal market.
Then again, why would that be any different from any promises about the Stormont House agreement on legacy or the financial inducements offered? The British ratted on the legacy deal within six weeks despite all parties and the Irish government being signed up to it.
Westminster returns on September 4. No sign of any legislation scheduled for the autumn either. All of which means no escape hatch for Donaldson, no Stormont executive.
Perhaps Donaldson will wait until the British general election next year and see if there’s another hung parliament? Not if the polls are correct. At an average 20 points ahead it’s widely predicted that Keir Starmer will win an overall majority.
You don’t suppose Donaldson expects any favours from a Labour government after the DUP’s role in Westminster in the last decade, but especially since 2017?
The trouble with these questions is that they assume that Donaldson has any strategy, never mind leadership qualities.
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Let’s have a brief look at the way he has tottered from post to pillar since Johnson shafted him in 2020.
In December 2020, a fortnight before the protocol became law, in an interview for the book Perils and Prospects of a United Ireland, Donaldson told Professor Padraig O’Malley: “In the end, customs checks doesn’t (sic) mean that you change the constitutional status of a part of the United Kingdom – that’s not going to happen. What it has done is changed the way that we trade… but it hasn’t altered the constitution of the UK.” O’Malley has that on tape.
Immediately following a shocking opinion poll on February 1 2021, showing the DUP five points behind Sinn Féin, Donaldson did an immediate volte-face and began to condemn the protocol as a threat to the north’s constitutional position, exactly the opposite of what he’d had been saying.
He spent that year prancing about the north in very dubious company, prominent in rallies and protest marches, some of which the PSNI said loyalist paramilitaries may have had a role in organising.
Alongside these divisive and destabilising marches, Donaldson began a legal campaign which ended in the UK Supreme Court and hilariously concluded that what Donaldson had told O’Malley in 2020 was correct: “The way we trade hasn’t altered the constitution of the UK.”
By the time his futile and intellectually dishonest campaigns were over, Donaldson had also wrecked the Good Friday Agreement institutions and exposed the north to the icy blast of full-blown Conservative austerity. All for nothing because he has precisely nothing to show for his zig-zagging over the last three years.
Where now? The answer is pretty obvious. He doesn’t know. He has no plan B, no strategy. On past evidence he has no leadership ability either. Instead, he follows the line of least resistance to loyalist blackmail and TUV extremism. That leads inexorably to a weakening of political unionism and the strengthening of loyalist bully boys and blowhards.
The line pushed by loyalism and encouraged by Donaldson’s actions is to make the Good Friday Agreement defunct. Without institutions unionism is powerless to prevent change advocated by Dublin through the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, where they make known ‘views and proposals’ to the British.
In the absence of institutions, which after all, unionism needs because they’re essential to those who support partition, loyalists become paranoid about Dublin influence and they return to the USP of unionism: violence or the threat of violence.
Expect nothing from leaderless, directionless unionism. Donaldson has boxed himself in. He can’t go back to Stormont without some legislation, thereby inviting derision by the TUV and loyalists. He can’t admit there’s no return to a pre-Brexit north. Zugzwang.
