Our Friends in the North? The DUP and the Tories aren’t ideologically close

Following the shock result of Thursday’s General Election, the Prime Minister has announced her intention to form a government with the help with her “friends and allies in the DUP”. The DUP and the Conservatives are aligned in their commitment to Brexit and Northern Ireland’s place in the union, but they are far from ideological twins with regards to other issues. Much has been made of the incompatibilities between the DUP’s hard-line stance on same sex marriage and the Conservatives, …

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Can you all just calm yourselves down a bit about the DUP?

Dear Virtue Signallers and assembled worthies from the Liberal Metropolitan Elite. Can you just calm yourselves down a bit about the DUP? I get you don’t like them, and God knows some of them can be hard to like. But Arlene and co having some leverage on Theresa May is not THE WORST THING EVER. It may even land us some much-needed infrastructure investment. But perhaps shiny new hospitals, roads and schools aren’t your thing. Maybe you’d rather do without the money? Maybe you’d …

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Will DUP demands be small and parochial or will they look to shape wider government policy?

Theresa May has now stated that she will look to work closely with her “friends and allies” in the DUP, but the terms of this deal are yet to be set out. Many of the smaller parties early on in the campaign were keen to rule out any kind of coalition or deal with either Labour or the Conservatives, having seen the electoral impact on the Liberal Democrats for having made such a bargain in 2010. The DUP however arguably …

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A deal reached: May going to the palace

Just in… from the Guardian We wait for the detail, but it’s a reasonable guess that this is a supply and confidence deal. As I noted this morning, the Conservatives and DUP share 328 seats, which is an effective majority of 3. Sinn Fein abstentionism increases it to 6. Andy BoalAndy has a very wide range of interests including Christianity, Lego, transport, music, the Alliance Party, chess and computers. Anything can appear in a post. Andy tweets at @andyboal www.andyboal.co.uk

The DUP are in pole position to remove the threats both of a hard border and a border poll

Brexit ‘s revival of  the spectre of a hard border and the support  of Ireland’s partners for a united Ireland  with consent within the EU was the perfect formula for the complete polarisation that has duly happened at Westminster level. Nationalism is now without representation at Westminster for the first time since 1966. The SDLP’s special pleading   for an anti-Brexit pact failed and their attack on Sinn Fein for abstaining from Westminster as if it was a new idea left …

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Theresa May’s gamble spectacularly backfires as she ends up with a hung Parliament and Boris waiting in the wings…

Wow. Politics continues to surprise us. What many thought would be a walkover for the Conservatives has ended up costing them their majority and putting May’s leadership on the line. What will happen next? Will May resign? Will Boris be the new leader of the Conservative Party? Will  Jeremy Corbyn become Prime Minister? Will there be a new election in the autumn? There is a lot of questions and not much answers. There will be much analysis over the next …

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All over bar the shouting…

As I write, the position is as follows:- Party Actual seats Expected final seats 2015-17 parliament Change Vote share Vote share change Conservatives 314 318 330 -12 42.4% +5.6% Labour 261 262 232 +30 40.2% +9.5% SNP 35 35 56 -21 3.0% -1.7% Liberal Democrats 12 12 8 +4 7.1% -0.6% DUP 10 10 8 +2 0.9% +0.3% Sinn Fein 7 7 4 +3 0.8% +0.2% Plaid Cymru 4 4 3 +1 0.5% +0.1% Green 1 1 1 – 1.6% …

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‘He saw a common well of untapped compassion and forgiveness’ – Mary McAleese at the Launch of One Man, One God: The Peace Ministry of Fr Alec Reid CSsR

One Man, One God: The Peace Ministry of Fr Alec Reid CSsR was launched on Tuesday at Clonard Monastery by former President Mary McAleese. The book chronicles Fr Reid’s incalculable contributions to the peace process on the island of Ireland, and explores how his Christian faith influenced and sustained him in his work. It was written by fellow Redemptorist Martin McKeever, a Belfast native and professor of moral theology in Rome, and published by Redemptorist Communications. In her remarks at …

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Election eve is hardly the time for calm consideration of the future

Say what you like about social media but the old fashioned papers are hard to beat to bring you the feel of the last minute election atmosphere. They’re  all the more frantic for the polls being all over the place and  late tragic dominance of “ keeping us safe.”   Later still, the Guardian’s monster montage of the right wing tabloids   Later, after Mail on Line posted their attack on Corbyn etc  True to form  the Daily Mail devotes …

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Will YouGov’s election model be vindicated when the results are in?

Opinion polling firm YouGov have raised eyebrows in the run up to Thursday’s poll with the results of their forecast model, which at the time of writing is forecasting that the Conservatives will only win 307 seats. This would deprive them of their parliamentary majority, and leaves open the possibility that Jeremy Corbyn could become Prime Minister if Labour could secure support from the smaller parties in the Commons. The YouGov model is out of line with other election forecasts, …

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Sadiq Khan saves growing row over police resources from becoming a farce

The row over Theresa May’s police cuts is going Gothic since Trump entered the fray to criticise London Mayor Sadiq Khan and then typically to repeat  his attack even though May tactfully corrected him. The London Evening Standard (editor George Osborne, the former chancellor sacked by May) details the developing story. It turns out Corbyn was prompted to call for May’s resignation by an ITV correspondent’s question. He in turn  had taken up  the resignation call from Steve Hilton, David …

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May’s and Corbyn’s descent to bickering over the response to jihadist terrorism shows their mutual mediocrity

Theresa May  is under pressure  even in her supposed area of expertise. The attacks on her for “police cuts” are election chaff. Her real defence  that cuts  that seemed sensible in 2010 are less so in the light of recent events doesn’t work in the climax of an election campaign, and Jeremy Corbyn’s call on her to resign is almost  laughably hypocritical. Even so she has only herself  to blame  for misfiring in her reaction to London bridge outside No 10 …

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Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland should have a say in the Brexit negotiations- Labour

Keir Starmer the former English director of public prosecutions who is Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary has written an “ exclusive “ for the New European paper headlined, “We’ll give Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales their say on Brexit’ says Keir Starmer. It sounded great when I heard about it but it took me took me a couple of reads to find what turned out to be an anticlimax. ..we will have the confidence to bring Parliament into the Brexit process, …

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Fishing at the Edge of the Rubicon

During the course of this General Election campaign, the tectonic plates of international relations have slipped, dramatically. The G7, the borderline disastrous NATO summit, and Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change, add up to most dramatic rift in the Western Alliance for decades – all in the space of a week. Yet serious debate on foreign policy has been strangely absent from the campaign, not only among the politicians and the pundits, but even …

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Why is Colum Eastwood pulling his punches on a border poll?

There is no point in denying the appeal of a united Ireland within the EU, even if the threat of a hard border turns out to be exaggerated for its malign effects on trade, integrated agriculture and ease of movement and Theresa May’s team returns from Brussels in triumph. It transcends narrow nationalism and reflects the Remain verdict in the EU referendum which put nationalism on the winning side, courtesy of quite a few on the unionist side. For the …

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Brokenshire’s line on a border poll won’t do. Straight after next week’s election, it will be incumbent to spell out terms and conditions for holding a unity referendum. And Dublin cannot be left out

In their manifesto,  the SDLP have now joined Sinn Fein in calling for a unity referendum, albeit on slightly different terms. Both are linking it to Brexit. If the combined nationalist share of the vote next week reaches 40+% which is highly manageable, can a unity referendum or border poll, reasonably be denied?  If not, what is reasonable?  By one reckoning a 50% threshold would seem unreasonably high for our divided community. By another, a referendum should wait until nationalists have …

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Corbyn’s failure to close down the IRA story rests on some inconvenient truths..

In the purist world of the most starry-eyed Corbynistas, the saintly Jeremy has no time for spin or subterfuge. That’s what the evil Blairites did, after all. But when it comes to his past stance on the IRA, spin is exactly what the Labour leader and his fan base have been attempting. Not very well either. So let’s dispense with the myth-making. The blunt truth is that Jeremy Corbyn and his fellow Labour left travellers campaigned politically for an IRA …

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The English, with an identity problem to die for

As a little Bank Holiday sidebar, I nick part of Libby Purves’ meditation on Identity in the Times (£) today which laments a lack of the English variety and compares it mournfully  with the rosiest possible version of the Irish kind.  Being English, she actually thinks north and south are much the same – imagine! Libby, a broadcaster and journalist of my slight acquaintance is also a keen yachtswoman. She put into Schull in west Cork for the Fastnet film …

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The government’s idea of compelling doctors to work for a period in the NHS…

The general public regards the NHS as something between a ‘sacred cow’ and a ‘national treasure’, despite all the pressures that it is under. For decades it has provided a universal service, largely free* at the point of use. The public may have a collective memory of the abysmal provision before it was introduced; to see just what changes it made, you have to look for ‘the short and simple annals of the poor’ — you could start by reading …

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They will have to shed cherished illusions about how to deal with jihadist terrorism. We were different, but we know the feeling

Since the Manchester atrocity a lifetime ago on Monday night, we can hear echoes of the Troubles every day.   The elevation of suicide into martyrdom is a common theme but very differently enacted and  very differently received; passively- aggressively by  hunger strike  thirty five  years ago  and bitterly dividing opinion to this day: aggressively only  by the IED of militant jihad today; generally condemned except by their own but probably secretly admired by more than we care  to acknowledge. The …

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