Editorial: DUP must beware of saying no to its own future

It is said that the DUP is at a crossroads. But this is the wrong diagnosis of its ailment. A crossroads suggests several directions of travel.

Arlene Foster was an insecure and often incompetent DUP leader, but she was a moderniser by the party’s dismal modernising standards

The Democratic Unionist Party was created to say no. From its founding by the Rev Ian Paisley in 1971 as the booming voice of Presbyterian fundamentalism and loyalist exceptionalism, it opposed every faltering attempt by Northern Ireland to move with the times.

The DUP said no to the Sunningdale power-sharing deal in 1973, to the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, to the attempts to find an accommodation with Irish nationalism in the early 1990s, and to the ...