Arlene Foster was replaced by the reactionary creationist Edwin Poots as leader of the Democratic Unionist Party on 14 May after being forced out of the post by hardline Loyalists. Foster is also being removed as First Minister of the Northern Irish Assembly. This is happening in the context of Brexit. After the Good Friday Agreement the DUP became the dominant party for Unionism, uniting the Loyalist working class with sections of middle-class Unionists. But the impacts of Brexit threaten to erode the material privileges afforded to these sections by British imperialism.
Foster became DUP leader in 2015 and first served as Stormont’s first minister from 2016 to 2017, until Stormont’s collapse in 2017. Its collapse was triggered by the ‘cash for ash’ corruption scandal which revealed the DUP government to be paying farmers and businesses out of public money for using ‘renewable’ energy methods that included wood-pellet fires. Foster had overseen the project since its 2012 inception in her role as Minister of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment. By 2017, for every £1 of wood-pellet fuel burned businesses were paid £1.60. An overwhelming proportion of claimants are farmers, a dominant part of the DUP’s traditional Loyalist voting base. Foster is accused of personally intervening to keep the scheme running after concerns were raised by civil servants as early as 2013 that those receiving the payment were heating empty properties just to burn more fuel and claim more money.
The scandal erupted in December 2016. Despite widespread anger, Foster – backed by her party – refused to resign. The DUP’s arrogance over the scandal only intensified public outrage. After being pushed by Sinn Fein voters, Sinn Fein’s then-leader Martin McGuiness eventually handed in his resignation as Deputy First Minister to force a new Assembly election. Instead, Stormont collapsed. Although Sinn Fein attempted to get back to power sharing under British imperialist rule, Loyalist paramilitaries met with the DUP to ensure no concessions would be made – particularly on the question of promoting the use of Irish language – for the sake of reconvening Stormont. Stormont was not reconvened until January 2020, with Foster again at its head.
Throughout Stormont’s three-year collapse – giving Northern Ireland the award for longest time spent without direct government, though it was still ruled by Westminster – Foster’s Brexiteer DUP went into power-sharing with the Conservatives, rejected Theresa May’s Brexit deal and believed Boris Johnson when he lied and said there would be no border between Northern Ireland and Britain. Although she was a vocal opponent of the Northern Ireland Protocol under the Brexit withdrawal agreement which put such a border in place in the Irish sea, Foster was routinely criticised by the hardline Unionists in her party for not doing enough to oppose the Protocol. Her most outspoken critic was Poots in his position as Minister of Agriculture, who went on to lead the process of having Foster removed. On 27 April the BBC reported on an internal letter of no confidence in Foster’s leadership that had already been signed by four of the DUP’s eight MPs and 22 of its 28 Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs). The next day Foster announced her resignation. Brenda Hale, former DUP MLA, described Foster’s ousting as a ‘political assassination’.
Voting in the leadership election was restricted to MLAs and MPs. Poots beat Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the DUP’s Westminster representative, by 19 votes to 17. Among DUP voters Donaldson was three times more popular than Poots. Poots is a proven racist, sexist and all round bigot who in 2013 argued in Stormont that gay couples should be prohibited from adopting children, in 2020 implied that coronavirus is a Catholic problem, and in 2016 stated that Foster’s most important role is being, not the leader of the party, but a wife, mother and daughter. He has insisted that his number one priority as the DUP’s leader will be removing the Protocol.
Poots represents the most reactionary layer of the Loyalist DUP voters. Loyalist paramilitaries have for months been threatening to carry out sustained violence if the Protocol is not removed or amended to allow for unfettered movement of goods and people across the United Kingdom. They came true to their word when they launched a one-week terror offensive across the north of Ireland at the end of March and beginning of April. Tensions that had been building among Loyalists since January, when the impacts of Brexit began to be felt, exploded. The ostensible trigger was the PSNI crackdown on Loyalist UDA drug gangs and the PSNI’s decision not to prosecute Sinn Fein politicians who attended IRA-man Bobby Storey’s funeral in alleged breach of Covid legislation.
After losing the leadership contest, Donaldson’s team leaked to the press its preparedness to force Stormont to collapse to send the Johnson government a warning that the DUP is ready to escalate its opposition to the Protocol. In her final visit to Downing Street as first minister, Foster told reporters that Johnson needs to intervene because the Protocol is ‘narrow[ing] the common ground’ in the north of Ireland and doing ‘real damage to the union’.
The DUP will alienate middle-class Unionists as it holds onto its reactionary base. Its hard stance on Brexit has already seen sections of these Unionists leaving to align themselves with the pro-EU centrist Alliance Party. Even Foster has announced she is leaving the DUP because ‘we are regressing and becoming more narrow. It is quite nasty.’ A LucidTalks poll reported in the Belfast Telegraph and Irish Times on 22 May predicted Sinn Fein will win the Northern Ireland Assembly’s elections in 2022, giving them, for the first time in history, the post of first minister. The poll indicates that the power-sharing executive will become more irrelevant as the DUP – whose approval rating has plummeted to 9% lower than Sinn Fein’s 25% – seek other avenues to promote its interests.
Ria Aibhilin
