What the new DUP leader means for Brexit

Edwin Poots’s narrow election victory will likely lead to renegotiation of the withdrawal agreement, writes Sean O’Grady, and allow the Northern Irish protocol to be greatly watered down

Edwin Poots gives the thumbs up outside Stormont after being elected as the new party leader (AP)

The admittedly narrow victory for Edwin Poots in the Democratic Unionist Party – by 19 votes to 17 – nonetheless marks a departure from the style and direction of his predecessor, Arlene Foster, forced out of office to make way for him. The defeated candidate, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, was seen, fairly or not, as a “continuity Arlene” figure, more of a pragmatist and less of a traditionalist than Poots – though the differences between the two men, and indeed across Ulster unionism more generally, are easily and often exaggerated. Poots is a true Paisleyite, and always has been, like his father before him. He comes from a political place unlike anything else in the British Isles.

At any rate, Poots now calls himself the “authentic voice of unionism”, thinly disguised code for a tilt towards some of the more muscular tendencies within the unionist movement. His victory has huge implications for Brexit too, most likely leading to some sort of renegotiation of the withdrawal agreement, and thus the wider Brexit deal.

In not taking on the position of first minister – but remaining as agriculture minister – Poots seems to want to concentrate on the political and campaigning aspect of leadership, rather than the administrative and bureaucratic. After all, the elections for the Northern Irish assembly next May will be crucial, and time is short. Poots may even try somehow to bring together the various separate and sometimes bickering brands of unionism into some sort of coalition or electoral alliance; he spoke of “reaching out to other leaders in unionism”. Oddly, he might occupy the kind of role that Gerry Adams and John Hume on the Republican and nationalist side for a while – party leader semi-detached from the government of the province.

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Edwin Poots replaces Arlene Foster as DUP leader

The DUP’s leadership election was remarkably old fashioned in all sorts of ways. It was, for example, the first in the UK where creationism became a bit of an issue. While both candidates are highly conservative in their social attitudes – opposing same-sex marriage and relaxation of abortion laws – Poots shaded it with his belief that the Earth is only about 6,000 years old and Charles Darwin’s theories are bunkum. The party has also favoured the kind of uncontested “emergence” of its leaders that the British Conservatives long-since abandoned. In its half-century history, this is the first contested leadership election, and the electorate is very small – no one-member-one-vote stuff here. The new leader benefited from winning the confidence of a mere eight DUP MPs at Westminster, plus the 28 DUP members of the Northern Ireland Assembly members – 36 people (29 men and seven women). There have been no public hustings, still less TV debates.

The first and most immediate task facing the new leader is, to borrow a phrase, to “get Brexit done”. The DUP has long-resented the Northern Ireland protocol in the UK-EU withdrawal agreement, which they consistently opposed, correctly predicting the damage it would do to Northern Ireland’s commerce and fearing that, as an internal economic border, it would start to fray the Union with Great Britain. And the Democratic Unionist Party after all stands for the union. The party’s sense of betrayal, rarely far from the surface, has turned to anger with Boris Johnson who once told the DUP Conference that no British premier could or should accept such an arrangement, but then signed up to it, just to get Brexit out of the way for the 2019 election.

Poots has promised a judicial review of the protocol, and argues its inconsistency with the status of the province in the UK and the Good Friday Belfast Agreement. After that it is not clear exactly what he might have in mind. As agriculture minister in the Northern Ireland Executive, he has skipped some meetings with his Irish counterpart, required as part of the peace process and for practical purposes, which looks like a mild protest against the way the protocol is operating. On the other hand, he has been responsible for the establishment of border controls at the port of Larne. How pragmatic the new DUP leader and his team is prepared to be remains to be seen, and he will have to seek compromise if he wants the power-sharing government to continue. Everything, in other words, is subject to cross-party consensus with Sinn Fein and others. But does he want it to continue? Or, rather, at what price?

Historically, Poots has opposed aspects of the peace process, but has nonetheless accepted office and served alongside Irish Republicans.

If Poots was minded to, he could quite easily make the protocol and thus Brexit in its current form unworkable, as the power behind the throne. There are already loyalist paramilitary elements and militants happy to blockade the port and intimidate border officials. There have been riots, which tend to beget more riots. It is the kind of grassroots revolt that collapsed a previous experiment in power sharing in the 1970s, when the Ulster Workers’ Council cut power supplies and brought the province to a standstill. Inside the executive or outside it, Poots could acquiesce in such protests, and allow events to take their chaotic course, even if Sinn Fein collapse power sharing again, as they did as recently as 2017.

Such a course would require Brexit to be re-written, de facto. In effect, Poots would call the bluff of the EU, and force them to force the Irish government to put a workable economic border between the EU and the UK on the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. All the way through Poots and Boris Johnson could protest that they want no such border – it would violate the Good Friday Agreement – and if it’s imposed then that’s down to Brussels and, unwillingly, Dublin. More likely the very threat of such an outcome might make the EU and Ireland cave in and allow the protocol to be greatly watered down – a win for the DUP and the Tories. It would certainly make them think hard about extending the grace periods for new stricter checks planned for Larne. In any case, the whole Brexit deal could be wrecked by what happens in around the port of Larne.

In due course, the “democratic assent” clauses of the Northern Ireland protocol, due to be triggered in 2024, will also offer an opportunity to revisit the protocol, though this may be too late for some of the more impatient sections of Unionism, and the “facts on the ground” may overtake the protocol by then in any case. There is only so much Westminster can do, or would want to do, to impose order in Northern Ireland.

Which brings us to the wider political task facing the DUP leader. Put crudely, Unionism is in danger of losing the leadership position it has enjoyed ever since the province was established and Ireland was partitioned a century ago. Once unified and hegemonic, Unionism is now splintered and the DUP is in danger of losing the position of first minister in next May’s election to the Northern Ireland Assembly. The notion of a Sinn Fein first minister of Northern Ireland is one that must strike deep gloom into the pessimistic heart of any loyalist. In fact, it is not as bad as it looks, because the first minister and deputy first minister are in reality equal co-first ministers, but the symbolism would be powerful, and especially if Sinn Fein managed to inveigle itself into some coalition in Dublin in the future. What would be even worse, though, would be if the DUP slipped back so far that the surging Alliance Party pipped them to second place and the deputy job (even though the Alliance Party is categorised as unionist for the purposes of the power sharing arrangement).

That’s not likely, but the DUP is losing moderate support to Alliance, while the “other”, original unionist party going back to the 1920s, the Ulster Unionists, stubbornly refuse to disappear, and retain a modest level of support. Meanwhile, the newish grouping, Traditional Unionist Voice, is also taking a slug of DUP hardline support away, particularly among working-class loyalists wary of compromise on social and identity issues such as the status of the Irish language, but above all frustrated by the DUP’s failure to prevent or scrap the Northern Ireland protocol. Poots will not want to be outflanked by a new, more demanding and defiant brand of unionism pushing it out of contention for power, and with good reason. That, after all, is how the DUP, under the fiery leadership of Ian Paisley, got going in the first place, and which attracted Edwin Poots’s father, Charlie, to be a founder of it, all those decades ago.