IT was not so long ago that the Prime Minister was saying that she, unlike Jeremy Corbyn, was not prepared to magic extra money out of the air to win support. But, two weeks on from the General Election, it is a different story. Theresa May now needs the DUP to support her government and so it turns out there is a magic money tree after all. And it has just produced £1billion for Northern Ireland.
For the negotiators of the DUP, the billion-pound bonus is a good result and will bring much needed extra spending to Northern Ireland. However, the £1billion will be going to a devolved assembly that does not have a functioning government. And how confident can the people of Northern Ireland be about the arrangement when millions was so recently wasted in the notorious green energy scheme set up by the DUP’s leader Arlene Foster?
As many have warned, the deal also has potentially worrying consequences for the peace process. Sinn Fein says the DUP/Tory pact is likely to make power-sharing harder and it is difficult to see how the UK Government can maintain its supposed non-partisan stance when it has a dependent relationship with one of the parties.
The potential consequences for the rest of the UK are also being played out. Ms Foster says the deal will strengthen the UK, but the First Minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones, thinks it will do the opposite. The £1bn, he says, was a bung to keep a weak PM in office and should mean extra funding for Wales. Ian Blackford, the SNP leader at Westminster, was also critical. A billion pounds was being handed over to Northern Ireland, he said, while Scotland was being offered little more than scraps from the table. Even David Mundell, the Scottish Secretary, appeared to think there should be extra funding when he addressed the issue last week. “Any funding that goes to Northern Ireland, then Barnett rules will ensure the appropriate funding comes to Scotland,” he said.
However, the truth is the Barnett Formula was never going to apply to the Northern Irish money, because it only affects budget spending in England. Barnett says that if there is a rise or a fall in England, similar rises or falls are worked out for Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales based on the formula; one-off payments such as the £1billion for Northern Ireland are not affected. This is not necessarily the fairest or most logical way of running things; it is just how it has been conventionally done and there are clear precedents to prove it, including the £1.2bn to Northern Ireland from Gordon Brown’s government in 2008.
Of course, the fact that the Government is following the small print of Barnett will not be enough to assuage its critics – and we all know what the deal is really about anyway. The decision to call the election was a disastrous miscalculation by Mrs May and has left her waiting for the day when her enemies in the party will put her out of her misery. The DUP deal, and its £1bn price tag, has delayed that day for a time, but it has done no more than delay it.
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