British PM agrees to £1bn deal for party’s support

Northern Irish party to get extra funding for backing Tories

LONDON // British prime minister Theresa May yesterday struck a deal to prop up her minority government by agreeing to at least £1 billion (Dh4.7bn) in extra funding for Northern Ireland in return for the support of the country’s biggest Protestant party. After more than two weeks of talks amid political turmoil sparked by her party’s failure to win a majority in the snap election on June 8, Mrs May can now be sure that her government can pass a budget and Brexit legislation. Mrs May and Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Arlene Foster presided at the signing of a three-page “confidence and supply” deal at Downing Street that is some way short of a more formal coalition agreement.

The deal means that the DUP’s 10 MPs will now vote in support of Mrs May’s 318 Conservatives in the 650-seat parliament on the budget, legislative agenda, motions of confidence and Brexit.

In return, Mrs May agreed to the extra funding over two years for Northern Ireland, agreeing to raise pensions yearly by at least 2.5 per cent and to keep universal winter fuel payments for the elderly.

The prime minister laced her deal with an attempt to end Northern Ireland’s political crisis by stipulating that the money would only be released to a power-sharing executive in Belfast, raising pressure on the DUP to make an agreement with their Catholic nationalist rivals.

The deal with the DUP, which won 292,316 votes in the election, will run for the life of the current parliament – due to end in 2022 – but will be reviewed after each parliamentary session, while most of the funding will be due in the first two years.

Even with the DUP’s politicians onside, Mrs May’s effective majority is slim and her position remains insecure, although she has promised to get her Conservative party out of what she called the messy outcome of the election.

Mrs May’s Brexit strategy is under scrutiny and her future as prime minister is the subject of public debate, with speculation that she could be challenged from within her party in months. As she negotiated the DUP deal, senior Conservatives such as former prime minister John Major raised concerns that an agreement with the DUP risks thrusting Northern Ireland back into turmoil by convincing “hard men” on both sides of the divide to return to violence.

The fear was that increasing the influence of pro-British unionists over the British govern- ment could create the perception that London was no longer an honest broker of the peace settlement reached in 1998. The Good Friday agreement brokered by the United States that year brought an end to three decades of violence in Northern Ireland, which killed about 3,600 people.

The country has been in crisis since Sinn Fein pulled out of government in January, prompting an election in March and a series of missed deadlines to restore the compulsory coalition between Catholic nationalists and pro-British Protestant unionists.

The latest deadline set by the British government for the parties in Northern Ireland to reach an agreement is Thursday.

Sinn Fein said last week that “time was running out” given the lack of knowledge about the consequences of a Conservative and DUP deal.