Last summer, after her unnecessary and disastrous general election campaign, designed to give her a strong and stable majority as she went into Brexit negotiations, the Maybot was obliged to purchase the allegiance of Northern Ireland’s weird party of creationists, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) for a sum of somewhere between £1 billion and £1.5 billion to make up for the majority that she had just lost.
(Just a little aside here. I’m always a bit dubious about anything, party or country, with the word “democratic” in the title. If you need to tell people you are democratic, you probably aren’t… Democratic Republic People’s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria… are you noticing a pattern?)
I’ve nothing against a coalition government or the compromises that are, perforce, a part of that kind of arrangement. But this wasn’t and isn’t a coalition arrangement, nor could it be, given the geographical limits of the DUP. It was and is, quite simply, a bribe to get for the Tories and May, the votes of DUP members in the House of Commons.
There are those who say that it was pretty much unnecessary. The DUP are the right wing, Protestant, unionist, queen and country (in short Tory) party of the province. Hardline Brexiteers, they would have voted, almost undoubtedly, with May even without a bribe.
But May couldn’t be sure of that, and what the hell, it wasn’t her money she was giving away.
(Another aside here: When the bribe was announced it caused consternation. Money above and beyond the budget to devolved government is supposed to be based on the Barnet formula. In other words, if NI gets money, so must, proportionately, the other countries of the UK. So our brave wee Viceroy Fluffy made a point of telling the BBC that he would not allow Northern Ireland to benefit from this sort of money without Scotland getting its fair share too. And that was the last we heard of it as Mrs May directed him to fetch the biscuits to go with her tea and he became permanently distracted with the more pressing matters of ensuring that the boss’s refreshments were supplied timeously or returning to the backbenches to be replaced by a wooden dummy….see below.)
Now, however, Gina Miller, the woman who took the UK government to court (and won) on whether or not parliament should have a say on the issuing of Article 50, has sent a legal warning to May that the £50 million pounds already paid to NI as part of this “arrangement” may be illegal, because it was given without being voted through parliament.
So, we shall see what we shall see…
Does anyone have an example of something Mayhem the Maybot has done that hasn’t gone horribly wrong?
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