Just over twelve hours after Arlene Foster released a statement which appeared to suggest the DUP were ready to fudge their red lines on the Irish border, the party leader popped up on BBC Ulster to make clear that this is not the case. In an interview this morning, Foster said ‘there cannot be any barriers between ourselves and the rest of the United Kingdom’:
BBC: Would you entertain checks being applied to goods being imported from Great Britain?
AF: No because there are many instances as to when… if you take someone getting goods in Northern Ireland coming from Great Britain those would be checked as they come into Northern Ireland and then they might be subject to other checks as well. So we cannot have the single market of the United Kingdom interfered with.
The DUP leader later re-iterated her comments in a press conference. This clear rebuke of extra regulatory checks on goods coming from Great Britain to NI means that the optimism felt in government on Monday afternoon will be short-lived. There was thinking that Foster was gifting Theresa May some wriggle room on the issue of agreeing the backstop with Brussels in order to finalise the EU withdrawal agreement – that appears not to be the case.
There has been an argument in recent weeks that the Prime Minister is less reliant on the DUP than she was a year ago so she can get away with making decisions that could leave its MPs unhappy. This is because as the Brexit deal has verged more on the soft side, No 10 can look to Labour votes. However, this seems rather optimistic thinking. Steve Baker today has said there are 40 Brexiteers ready to vote the deal down. That number may reduce as the time of the vote approaches but even with everything going to plan for May there are only around 20 Labour MPs seen to be likely to vote with the Tories on Brexit. It follows that May needs the DUP votes for the deal – and then their support after if the confidence and supply agreement is to continue.
The problem is that the DUP – and some Tory MPs – believe May has not learnt her lesson from December. It was then that No 10 tried to bounce the DUP into agreeing a statement on the Irish border. Foster saw red and it led to Theresa May having to cut her working lunch with Michel Barnier short. This was followed by a series of days where the government had to nervously wait for the DUP to come up with a form of words that they deemed satisfactory. Despite how that played out, there are some in government who think Theresa May should call the DUP’s bluff on regulatory checks as when push came to shove they wouldn’t risk bringing the government down and helping Jeremy Corbyn. But given that a DUP source once said of their negotiating tactic, ‘this a battle of who blinks first — and we’ve cut off our eyelids’, it’s a brave PM who thinks such a strategy is their best way forward.
So, where does this leave the negotiations? I understand from DUP sources that although they would ideally wish for a Brexit that gives the UK the most freedom and opportunity possible, their red line is still that NI must be treated the same as the rest of the UK. That means that if no solution can be found on the Irish border to keep their support No 10 could be forced into agreeing to a softer Brexit with some form of customs union – or a no deal Brexit. And if the UK government press ahead anyway with plans for more regulatory checks? ‘You can only press the nuclear button once,’ warns a DUP source.
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