Northern ireland

Portrait of the week: A bombshell by-election, Scotland bans Mancunians and China staffs its space station

Home The government contemplated its promised Planning Bill, blamed for contributing to the astonishing victory for the Liberal Democrat Sarah Green in the Chesham and Amersham by-election. She had gained 21,517 votes to transform the former Conservative majority of 16,223 into one of 8,028. Labour did worse than in any by-election before, securing only 622 votes, 1.6 per cent of the total. John Bercow, the former Speaker, joined the Labour party. Clayton Dubilier & Rice, an American private equity company, offered to buy Morrisons, the supermarket chain, for £5.5 billion. White working-class pupils in England have been failed by decades of neglect, the Education Select Committee found in a report.

Can Jeffrey Donaldson halt the DUP’s civil war?

Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the Lagan Valley MP, has triumphed in the one-horse race to replace Edwin Poots as leader of the DUP, getting the top job at the second time of asking. Nobody else came forward to instigate a leadership election, meaning that his appointment will be rubber stamped when the party’s electoral college meets this Saturday. Respected at Westminster, Donaldson seems a more plausible fit for high office than the gauche Poots, though both men are remarkably similar; Donaldson, like Poots, is a committed Christian and is a prominent Orangeman. History is never far away from the politics of Northern Ireland. Donaldson’s win coincides with the centenary of the

Edwin Poots’s resignation could cause a crisis in Northern Ireland

The end of Edwin Poots’s 21-day spell as leader of the DUP sums up the ordeal of being a unionist leader. Elected as a hard-line replacement for Arlene Foster, he has departed now after being seen to have given too much away to Sinn Fein over the Irish language. Who will replace him? The early candidate appears to be Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the party’s Westminster leader who was defeated by Poots in last month’s contest. His supporters are championing him as a stabilising influence in a party which has ripped itself apart, with others suggesting that he should be elected without a contest. Poots’s election was a last roll of

Edwin Poots’s departure is a sign of the chaos engulfing the DUP

Only 20 days after winning the party leadership by one vote, Edwin Poots has resigned as DUP leader. The immediate trigger for his departure is him nominating a First Minister today in spite of the opposition of a majority of both DUP MLAs and MPs. (They were unhappy about the late night Irish Language Act compromise). But him being forced out can only really be understood in the context of bad blood created by his brutal ouster of Arlene Foster and his decision to sack all her ministers bar one, himself, in a reshuffle last week. Poots’s departure is a sign of the chaos engulfing the DUP. It is being

The protocol may be Boris’s greatest masterstroke

The jibes thrown at Boris Johnson over his unhappiness with the Northern Ireland protocol — based on the obvious observation that he was the one who signed it — have been based on the assumption that he is either a liar or a fool. A liar because he knew full well what he was signing up to, or a fool for not knowing what he was agreeing to. Does anyone think that officials told him that the protocol would prevent Northern Ireland having access to some cancer drugs? Or guide dogs being unable to move between GB and NI? Keir Starmer has repeated the jibe about Johnson. A further version is

Boris Johnson’s Northern Ireland problem

In an at times grouchy press conference, Boris Johnson tried to calm the row over the Northern Ireland protocol. The Prime Minister declined to comment on what Emmanuel Macron is supposed to have said about Northern Ireland’s position in the UK. He said that the whole issue of the protocol had taken up a ‘vestigial’ amount of time at the summit. (Interestingly, Mujtaba Rahman of Eurasia Group, who is particularly well connected in EU capitals, says that he has been told it took up two-thirds of the conversations in the margins of the summit).  Instead, Johnson wanted to emphasise the vaccine commitments that the summit had made and how these

How to fix the protocol

The blame game between London and Brussels over the Northern Ireland protocol obscures the fact that there are solutions waiting to be found. There are, as I say in the Times today, ways to reform the protocol and better protect the Good Friday Agreement while not threatening the integrity of the single market. Three changes would render the protocol far more acceptable Three changes would render the protocol far more acceptable and would better position it to withstand the undoubted pressures it will come under when the EU and UK start to diverge their regulations.  The first of these is a trusted trader scheme for food. This would allow registered

Joe Biden doesn’t understand Northern Ireland

Even a pessimist could be forgiven for being surprised by Joe ‘I’m Irish’ Biden’s ham-fisted intervention in the ongoing row over the Northern Ireland protocol. If Boris Johnson’s remark that the phrase ‘special relationship’ didn’t ring true before, they certainly must after the President opened his visit by quoting Y.B. Yeats on the Easter Rising… while visiting a Royal Air Force base. It will also be a wearisomely familiar routine for Ulster unionists, who have been scorning American pressure to abandon Britain since at least the days of Woodrow Wilson. How will the government respond? There remain many on the right bewitched by yesterday’s Atlanticism. It ought to be absurd

James Forsyth

Why this G7 summit matters more than most

It’s risky planning a trip to the British seaside at any time of year. But if the weather forecast is to be believed, Boris Johnson will get away with this gamble at the weekend’s meeting of the G7 at Carbis Bay in Cornwall. Brexit’s critics were always going to seize on any evidence that Britain was being sidelined by the rest of the world after we left the EU. So it is fortunate for the government that the UK is the host of this year’s summit because it has placed this country at the centre of things. This G7 is unusually consequential. It is the first time that these leaders

It’s time to revisit the Northern Ireland protocol

Britain has already seen two ‘Brexit days’ — when it formally left the EU on 31 January 2020 and the end of the transition period 11 months later. But given that it has taken less than six months for the Northern Ireland protocol to unravel, it’s horribly clear that our future relationship with the EU is anything but settled. The transport of sausages and other chilled meats from Britain to Northern Irish supermarkets may seem a trivial matter. But the attempt by the EU to enforce a ban on this trade demonstrates what so many people found problematic about the idea of an internal UK border down the Irish Sea.

How long will Edwin Poots’s DUP reign last?

New DUP leader Edwin Poots has wasted little time consigning the Arlene Foster era to history. Poots’ shake-up of his Stormont ministerial team has resulted in Foster’s loyalists being shown the door, in favour of what the Traditional Unionist Voice leader Jim Allister drily termed ‘Poots’ posts’. Poots’ appointment of Paul Givan, his fellow Lagan Valley MLA, as first minister of Northern Ireland, is perhaps his most controversial, though not unexpected, move. Givan, who like Poots is a creationist, is one of the more verbose figures in the DUP hinterland. During his previous spell as communities minister – at the height of the renewable heating crisis, which did for devolution

Independence would be karmic vengeance for Sturgeon

I have a mean streak. Perhaps my cruellest urge is to give people what they claim to want. When political parvenues disparage capitalism and the unfairness of meritocracy while talking up an ‘equitable’ socialist utopia, I want to stick them personally in a society where work pays the same as sloth, the well-off flee and the left behind expect everything to be free — just so long as the rest of us don’t have to submit to this inert destitution, too. When eco fanatics demand zero carbon emissions by 2025, I yearn for their own Amazon orders to arrive months later by donkey cart. I’d grant their wish: dead phone

The EU is overplaying its hand on Northern Ireland

The EU’s decision to take control of the vaccine programme was hardly a roaring success. The eurozone’s economy remains stuck in recession. And the EU’s foreign policy is a mess, as events in Belarus have just made clear.  Still, despite the evidence that she isn’t very good at managing anything, no one can argue that the European Union’s president Ursula von der Leyen lacks self-confidence. Last night, she made it clear there could be no possible compromise over the Northern Ireland protocol. The trouble is that she could easily bring the whole trade deal between the EU and the UK crashing down. As so often, the EU is overplaying its

Could Sinn Fein become the largest party in Northern Ireland?

In 2022, a year after its centenary, there is the chance that Northern Ireland could end up with a nationalist, republican, Sinn Fein First Minister. The latest survey of popular opinion in the province, polled by LucidTalk, currently has Sinn Fein as the largest party on 25 per cent, nine points clear of the DUP who have slumped to 16 per cent – from around 30 per cent at the 2019 Westminster election. Meanwhile, there has been a slight upswing in the performance of the Ulster Unionists and Traditional Unionist Voice. The middle ground Alliance party are on the same level as the DUP, while the moderate SDLP appear to

More devolution won’t save the Union

Yesterday, Lord Dunlop – the author of the Dunlop Review into the British state and devolution – appeared before a joint meeting of four Select Committees. It was the first time the Public Accounts and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC), Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish committees had sat together, which was fitting given his remit. But the resultant Q&A only highlighted the ongoing tensions in the government’s approach to the Union. Dunlop is an advocate of what he calls a ‘cooperative Union’. His emphasis is on getting the various parts of the governments of the UK to work together, and building on the past two decades of devolution. He summarised his

The two halves of Ireland can’t be forced together

Last week, Edwin Poots was elected leader of the DUP. You will have read all about him. I have. You may not previously have known much about him. I didn’t. We should hesitate, I think, to respond to his elevation with a broad-brush sneering dismissal, or in personal terms. We know, of course, about Mr Poots’s creationist beliefs and most of us reject them, and I don’t like his views on homosexuality or abortion; but Poots has proved able to work pragmatically with republican fellow politicians. In an important way, though, this isn’t about Poots, but what he represents: a unionist shift towards back-to-basics fundamentalism. His party is lurching towards

Can the DUP survive?

A 36-person strong electorate will meet in Belfast this Friday to elect Arlene Foster’s replacement as leader of the Democratic Unionist party.  The choice facing the assembled ranks of the party’s MPs and members of the legislative assembly (MLAs) is, amusingly, between two men who share the same office in Lisburn: the Lagan Valley MP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and Edwin Poots, the Stormont agriculture minister. Such is the DUP way, the two candidates are under orders not to speak to the media or undertake any form of public-facing promotional activity for the duration of the contest. However, a document sent by Poots to his colleagues setting out his vision for the

What’s next for the Union?

The Union faces two simultaneous challenges in Northern Ireland and Scotland that both look set to worsen in the coming years. In Northern Ireland, the immediate problem is that Brexit has disturbed the fragile balance there. (A more persistent problem is the fact that after the Good Friday agreement, the Democratic Unionist party and Sinn Fein replaced the more moderate Ulster Unionists and the Social Democratic and Labour party as the main Unionist and Nationalist parties.) The debate over where various borders should go has turned into a question of identity. Unionists argue that the UK government’s agreement to create half a border in the Irish Sea threatens Northern Ireland’s

Portrait of the week: Covid retreats, raves resume and a £165,000 squid

Home ‘I think we have got a good chance of being able to dispense with the one-metre-plus from 21 June,’ Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, remarked. By the beginning of the week, 29 per cent of the adult population had received both doses of coronavirus vaccination; 65 per cent the first dose. In the seven days up to the beginning of the week, 107 people had died, bringing the total number of deaths (within 28 days of testing positive for coronavirus) to 127,534. Maldon in Essex reported three cases per 100,000 people, which meant only two people in the whole district. Care home residents in England were allowed to make

Unionist opinion will harden unless the EU gives ground

Arlene Foster has been forced out as DUP leader because of Unionist anger about the Northern Ireland protocol. She is blamed for being far too trusting of Boris Johnson. Her party’s anger with her has been compounded by how it has fallen in the polls since the protocol started being implemented. But as I say in theTimes this morning, the protocol isn’t even yet in full effect. If the protocol were to be implemented in full, Unionist opposition towards it would escalate to the next level. Next year’s Stormont election would turn into a proxy referendum on the protocol, with unionist parties arguing that if they can get a majority, they