A Creationist Could Become the Leader of a Major UK Political Party

The ruling party in Northern Ireland faces a leadership election between two ultra-conservative candidates who opposed the Good Friday Agreement which ended the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Of the two candidates, one is a creationist who rejects the theory of evolution, and the other is a former aide to long-dead far-right British politician.

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the largest unionist party in Northern Ireland, is holding its first leadership contest in its 50-year history, being led for 37 of those years by the party’s founder; the Reverend Ian Paisley, followed by Peter Robinson and most recently Arlene Foster, both ratified without contest.

Foster announced she would be stepping down as leader and First Minister of Northern Ireland on the 18th of May and end of June respectively, after DUP politicians signed a letter of no confidence in her in part because she abstained from a vote to ban gay conversion therapy, while her party voted against the ban.

The election will be decided by the narrowest selectoriat in British or Irish politics. Just the party’s eight MPs and 28 Northern Ireland Assembly Members – 29 men and seven women – will decide the contest.

The DUP was founded in 1971 during the Troubles in Northern Ireland by Paisley, a Protestant evangelical and the head of the Free Presbytarian Church of Ulster. It had links to various loyalist paramilitary groups and is often characterised as ultra-conservative, opposing abortion and same-sex marriage. In recent years it overtook the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) to become the largest unionist party in Northern Ireland. By number of MPs it is the fifth largest party in the UK House of Commons and has the most seats in the devolved Northern Ireland Assembly.

The outcome of the leadership race will determine only the new leader of the DUP, unusually, the winner will not necessarily become First Minister of Northern Ireland. One of the candidates, Edwin Poots, has indicated that he would split the roles and appoint a First Minister. The other candidate, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, is a sitting MP in Westminster, and party rules state the the First Minister must be a Northern Ireland Assembly member.

Poots is Northern Ireland’s Minister for Agriculture and also a Young Earth Creationist, a Christian fundamentalist position that maintains the world is only around 6,000 years old, rejecting ideas like the theory of evolution and the fossil record. A former farmer, Poots once shot two shotgun rounds into the air to warn off intruders to his home.

The 55-year-old is of staunch unionist pedigree. His father, the late Charles Poots, was a founding member of the DUP alongside Paisley.

To say Poots’ career has been marked by controversy is an understatement. In 2011 as health minister he banned gay men from giving blood and later said the ban should also apply to people who had sex "with somebody in Africa or sex with prostitutes".

In 2020 he falsely claimed that the coronavirus was more common in nationalist areas, saying that the difference in transmission between nationalist and unionist areas was “around six to one” – a completely imaginary figure, especially as COVID data in Northern Ireland is not collected according to political or religious affiliation.

Despite this, or perhaps because of these controversies, Poots is popular within his party, garnering support from key figures like DUP MP Sammy Wilson and Ian Paisley Jr, son of the party’s founder – both diehard unionists in their own right.

The hope within diehard circles is that a Poots regime will double-down on the party’s resistance to what they see as the encroachment of their traditional enemies; Sinn Fein and Irish nationalism more broadly, under the guise of progressive policy such as Irish Language legislation, North-South co-operation and association with the EU.

Poot’s opponent is Sir Jeffrey Donaldson. Billed as a moderate candidate, he is a former aide to Enoch Powell, a far-right English Conservative and later Ulster Unionist Party politician, best known for his infamous 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech against immigration, which has been blamed for sparking a wave of racist violence. Upon Powell’s death in 2008 Donaldson joined other politically conservative figures such as Margaret Thatcher and David Trimble in commemorating Powell, even going so far as to call Powell a “true statesman” and lamenting the loss of a “great intellect.”

Donaldson has had a long and storied career in British politics, most notably being involved in negotiating the peace process as a member of the UUP in 1998 and later walking out of the negotiations in protest to what he saw as unacceptable concessions made to the nationalist side.

Donaldson keeps a lower profile than his opponent, eschewing inflammatory rhetoric in favour of a more parliamentary manner. While Donaldson might stop the DUP hemorrhaging moderate support, he is by no means a progressive candidate, consistently opposing legislation around same-sex marriage and abortion rights.

The winner of the contest will have the task of rescuing the public image of the party, which has been strongly criticised in the unionist community for helping deliver a Brexit deal which included the controversial Northern Ireland Protocol. The Protocol has resulted in a customs border in the Irish sea as Northern Ireland remains part of both the EU single market and the UK internal market. This means that checks must take place on goods entering Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK but also avoids placing a hard border on the island of Ireland; something prohibited by the Good Friday Agreement. A border dividing Nothern Ireland from the rest of the UK is extremely controverisal to loyalists.

The DUP threw its weight behind Boris Johnson’s Brexit in an attempt to put ground between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and has been left holding the bag. The party has insisted it was duped after multiple assurances there would be no sea border from Westminster proved false, saddling it with blame for creating a rift between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

Since the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol, support for the DUP among the loyalist community has been put under increasing strain.

Jamie Bryson, a loyalist activist and editor of Unionist Voice, a unionist news site and monthly newsletter, said “Arlene Foster’s incredible assertion that there was ‘potential’ in the Protocol caused amazement within the unionist community.” Bryson believes that the Protocol was “designed to mutilate the Union.”

The party reacted to the criticism by encouraging resistance to the Northern Ireland protocol, using inflammatory rhetoric to side with angered loyalists. In February, DUP MP Wilson called for “guerilla warfare” against the protocol, using “every means we have” showcasing the DUP’s scramble to cast blame for the protocol’s implementation away from themselves. Though Wilson dismissed his remarks as "metaphorical", they came less than a week before the Loyalist Communities Council, an umbrella group representing non-metaphorical major loyalist paramilitaries, withdrew its support for the Good Friday Agreement.

This was followed in late March by the worst unrest the region has seen in years. Hundreds of youths across loyalist areas rioted, with water cannons deployed and 88 police officers injured.

Quarrels also erupted at interface points such as Lanark Way between the loyalist and nationalist communities, with youths on either side exchanging rocks and fireworks through the burning interface gate, in a worrying flash of sectarian violence.

The reaction from the DUP was confused, with leader Foster saying that rioters “are an embarrassment to Northern Ireland and only serve to take the focus off the real law breakers in Sinn Fein” – a reference to leading Sinn Fein members controversially attending the funeral of Bobby Storey, former IRA head of intelligence and Northern Chairman of Sinn Fein last June, despite COVID restrictions.

The riots petered out after the death of Prince Philip, supposedly out of respect to the royal family.

Amid this tumult, on the 20th of April, Foster abstained from a vote to ban gay conversion therapy, while the majority of her party voted against the ban. While Foster had been damaged by her handling of Brexit, her failure to defend gay conversaion therapy saw her party colleagues reach boiling point. On the 27th of April, 85 percent of DUP politicians penned a letter of no confidence in their party leader. 

Bryson says that, “Faith in the DUP is eroding”, believing that a new leader must “put an end to the perpetual appeasement of nationalist demands, and of course to actually resist the Protocol by deeds rather than mere words.”

Bryson sees Poots as the man to restore faith in the party, believing he is more committed to “stemming the tide of the appeasement process.”

However, taking a hard-line will likely push more moderate voters into the arms of other Unionist or non-sectarian parties, potentially leading to a substantial loss of power for the DUP. The unionist vote share saw a dramatic 5.5 percent drop between 2016 and 2019, ceding much of that support to non-sectarian parties like the Alliance Party, which more than doubled its vote share between 2017 and 2019. Recent polling also suggests only 17 percent of 18-24 year olds in Northern Ireland consider themselves British, compared to 50 percent of those over 65.

Earlier this week, the UUP, the second largest unionist party, was also thrown into a leadership contest after leader Steve Aiken stepped down. These contests come at a time of decline in the unionist vote share, both on account of shifting demographics and more recently due to the emergence of a more viable non-sectarian middle ground. Slight declines have also been seen in the nationalist vote.

While homophobia, creationism and metaphors about guerilla war might appeal to the DUP’s most ardent supporters, they will do little to win favour with those outside their base. With questions like Irish unity being aired publicly, it will be the unaligned demographic who ultimately swing the tide in future elections. No longer is Northern Ireland a “Protestant state for a Protestant people”, a view held by James Craig, Northern Ireland’s first Prime Minister, but rather one on the precipice of change.