The DUP is, strictly speaking, not a British party at all: it organizes and contests elections only in Northern Ireland, where it has become the largest party on the Protestant and Unionist side of the divide. But its raison d’être is the preservation of the “British” identity and political allegiance among those in Northern Ireland—and therefore the maintenance of Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom. Yet the DUP’s Britishness is increasingly out of kilter with Britain itself. This is a decidedly unbalanced love affair in which most of the ardor is on one side. What the DUP thinks of as an indissoluble bond is, for British Conservatives, a marriage of convenience.
There are two underlying problems. One is religion. Historically speaking, there is no doubt that English and, later, British identity pivoted on Protestantism. The collective “us” was defined in opposition to a “them” that was primarily Catholic: Catholic Spain, Catholic France, Catholic rebels in Ireland and Scotland. The DUP’s own mindset is completely in accord with this Protestant formation. Its history is militantly anti-Catholic, and though it tries to play this down nowadays, the reality of Northern Ireland’s sectarian divide is that Democratic Unionists still see themselves facing off against a growing and increasingly assertive Catholic minority. [...]
The other problem for the DUP is the rise of a specifically English nationalism. English conservatism has long seen the preservation of the Union, including Northern Ireland, as a definitive goal: May’s party, after all, is officially still called the Conservative and Unionist Party. But the Brexit project has shown this commitment to be much stronger in rhetoric than in reality. Both Scotland and Northern Ireland voted decisively against leaving the EU. The Brexiteers are willing to go much further than just ignoring the wishes of those populations; it is clear that if Brexit were to lead to an independent Scotland and a United Ireland, its proponents would see these outcomes as prices worth paying. This makes sense: Brexit is, above all, an English national revolution—and its imagined act of liberation would be all the purer if it resulted in an independent English state.
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