The real extremists

WITh sickening hypocrisy, Labour MPs protest against Theresa May’s talks with the Democratic Unionist Party, holding placards demanding: ‘Drop the DUP deal.’

This paper does not recall such demonstrations when Gordon Brown sought a deal with the DUP in 2010, or when ed Miliband did the same in 2015.

But hypocrisy aside, they do the Northern Irish party a huge injustice when they condemn it as an extremist, gay-bashing sympathiser with Protestant terrorists.

Certainly, the DUP represents an oldfashioned brand of conservatism on issues such as abortion and gay marriage. But far from being viscerally homophobic, the party backed a local version of ‘Turing’s law’ which granted retrospective pardons to those convicted of homosexual acts under old laws.

Most unfounded of all is the portrayal of the DUP as the Protestant equivalent of Jeremy Corbyn’s friends in Sinn Fein, who hailed bombs and bullets as legitimate means of achieving political ends.

even under the tub-thumping Ian Paisley Snr, the DUP consistently condemned political violence. As for its present leader Arlene Foster, whose police officer father was almost killed in a shooting, she has always abhorred terrorism.

No, there is no shame at all in Mrs May’s efforts to deal with a party representing Ulster’s decent, peace-loving majority.

Most emphatically, the same can’t be said for Mr Corbyn’s relations with the IRA.