Boring, boring, boring. That sums up the DUP conference at the Crowne Plaza hotel on Saturday.
Incidentally, why does the party keep returning to that venue where it fell apart in May 2021 amid a shouting match, walk-outs and resignations? It’s not as if they need a big hall any more to accommodate the 200 or so who turn up.
Since then it’s been a steady decline for the party, culminating in an unremittingly awful 2024.
The current ‘in’ word is ‘reset’ and if ever a political party needed one, it’s the DUP.
However, if members were looking to their recently-anointed leader, Gavin Robinson, they were disappointed. He delivered a 40-minute speech of peerless dullness, devoid of vision, imagination or inspiration. He knows there has to be reform but provided no clue how to go about it.
Here’s the treacle he offered his party faithful to wade through: “With a new leader there will be a new approach both internally and externally as to how we do our business, which will be people-centred and focussed on getting outcomes which better the lives of all our people.”
Meaningless waffle out of the same stable as the justifiably-reviled Programme for Government. No specifics; not a clue about anything that will change or what difference anyone will see.
In fact the only specifics have been presented in an article by former special advisor and councillor Lee Reynolds, who was absent from the gathering and whose criticisms and suggestions were ignored on the platform.
However, neither Robinson nor Reynolds showed any awareness that the DUP requires a fundamental rethink to fit into society in the third decade of the 21st century.
Rather than a party, the DUP is a cross between a sect and a cargo cult. Older members joined years ago because they saw Paisley’s party as reflecting their religious principles, and both younger and older members believe that England will reward their loyalty by delivering political goodies.
Still? You’d think the warning from Edward Carson a century ago that the relationship with England has always been solely to keep the Conservative party in power would have cured unionists of their cargo cult myth. If it didn’t, surely the past eight years proved it irrefutably?
Unfortunately for the DUP’'s future, Robinson didn’t address any of that. Instead he droned on about DUP hobby horses.
First, unionist unity, a chimera best illustrated by Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’.
Does Robinson not know that Carroll subtitled it ‘An Agony in Eight Fits’? That the Snark will remain forever elusive? That unionism is more divided than it has ever been and, most importantly, with demographic change accelerating, the very purpose and rationale of unionism has to be re-examined? Evidently not.
Then, inevitably, the Protocol and the Windsor Framework and how he’s working to have it changed.
The dogs in the street know that ship has sailed. The new British government’s manifesto explicitly commits them to operate the Windsor Framework “in good faith”.
On Sunday our proconsul told Retail NI that “in order to get a veterinary agreement in the future, we have to honour the agreements we’ve signed in the past for reasons that will be obvious to every single person in the room”. Not to the DUP leader. He still clings to his ‘Safeguarding the Union’ con job which altered nothing: pitiful.
Another DUP hobby horse is that Johnson drove “a coach and horses through the cross-community consent principle which has been at the very heart of all political progress” here. Nope.
Robinson went on: “The basis of the Belfast Agreement and all subsequent agreements has been the requirement for significant decisions to command the support of both communities in Northern Ireland.”
Now, that assertion is flat wrong and needs to be called out for what it is. It’s an attempt by the DUP to resurrect the unionist veto.
Maybe Robinson has repeated that canard, first raised by his predecessor Donaldson, so often that he now actually believes it. The fact is, and the Good Friday provisions are explicit about it, that unionist consent is needed only for constitutional change and NOT for “significant decisions”, which you’ll note Robinson doesn’t and can’t define.
What the DUP has tried to do since 2017 is to assert that not only is unionist consent required for constitutional change, but it’s required for any change whatsoever that they don’t like.
Those days are gone, as they should be, but the end of the unionist veto on all and any change is particularly necessary since unionism has become a diminishing political minority.
In short, Robinson’s ‘new’ approach about how the DUP does its business remains remarkably like the failed approach of recent years.