Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

This blog has no time for the DUP which has brought down power sharing in Northern Ireland and is now making organised government in the UK impossible. It is a Leave party, but Northern Ireland voted Remain. It is against the Backstop but the majority in NI favour it. It claims to put the Union with the UK above Brexit. Yet in driving the nation to a No Deal Brexit by demanding changes to which the EU will never agree, it poses the greatest existential threat to the United Kingdom since its formation.

Because hard Brexit will create turmoil to everyday life in NI, as it will  require direct rule and  controls on the border between the two Irelands. That will build irresistible pressure to unite North with South, keeping NI in the EU, by removing it from the UK. Every poll reveals a majority for Irish unity in the event of a return to border controls. Far worse for the DUP than the backstop. Then of course there is Scotland, yanked out of the EU against its will. We know what comes next there.

May got herself mixed up with the DUP out of desperation at the loss of her majority. But the ERG climbed into bed with them out of choice because it thought itself clever. Something else to explain to the Tory Shires.

The nation, indeed the world, looks on in disbelief as the hope that parliament having taken control,  showed it could exercise it, passes in another string of Nos. This is because there is no spirit of compromise at one level and at another far too many members have no idea what they are doing or why. Add to that a voting system which mathematically is almost certain to produce deadlock, rather than one which, by elimination through transferrable or preference votes, automatically reveals a winner, and you have the fiasco that the Mother of Parliaments has become.

So it is back to Downing Street for another Cabinet punch up. Anything can happen there. What should happen is an announcement by May that her deal with minor tweeks acceptable to Brussels will go back for its fourth vote but as a confidence motion. If lost the government will fall, May will drive to the Palace and advise the Queen to send for Corbyn. That will concentrate minds. Corbyn would,  with a crash Brexit hours away, have to use the Royal Prerogative to revoke Article 50 to save the nation from disaster.

The ERG could then go home to their various constituencies and explain how it was they played their cards with such skill and panache that they ended up scuppering Brexit and putting Corbyn in power. Popular events in the Tory Shires, to be sure.