A flag popular with DUP supporters: the Red Hand of Ulster in fascist salute, the Israeli blue star, and the English Crown
British Prime Minister Theresa May
has finalised a deal with the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party to prop up her minority Tory government. This arrangement, made in the wake of the surprising and encouraging surge of electoral support for the leftist Labour candidate Jeremy Corbyn, has focused public attention on the nature of the Theresa May's new friends. Indeed, the link between the English ruling elite and the DUP are extensive and run deep.
Corbyn overcame an inner-Labour party conflict, a hostile media campaign, and initially poor opinion polls predicting a Tory landslide. He won over enough of the electorate on an anti-austerity manifesto, and
achieved the largest vote swing to Labour since the 1945 election of Clement Attlee.
However, this result should not blind us to the emergent danger in our midst - the political alliance between the Conservative Party and the DUP. In an article published in Jacobin magazine, authors Kerby Miller and Connor Lewis examine the nature and political platform of the DUP. In their article, entitled '
May's Monsters', they reveal deeply sectarian, ultra-right wing and bigoted politics of the DUP and its base of support. Not only does it advocate an exclusively Protestant state for Protestant people to the exclusion of all others, it has extensive links with
Loyalist paramilitary terrorist death squads.
Comment: The U.S. keeps trotting out the same script, but it doesn't appear to be working any more.