Shallow,bribes and ashamed

A shallow victory? One won by bribes? The morality of DUP polititans? We haven't heard the end of it yet?

These seem to be the conclusions coming out of the voting yesterday.

Of all the parties it is the Democratic unionists who get the most criticism with claims that they were bribed with £1.2b.Iain Duncan Smith immediately after the vote asking the speaker

"We understand there has been internal agreement to an extra expenditure in Northern Ireland of some £1.2bn announced today. I wonder if you have had notice of an emergency budget statement concerning Northern Ireland?"

Iain Dale calls them the Depend upon promises party

Peter Robinson's leadership of the DUP has certainly got off to an inauspicious start. The phrase 'no surrender' is one which can never be applied to them again. Robinson cravely surrendered to a Gordon Brown bribe. We don't know what they asked for and we don't know what they got. But it must have been big.

Patrick Hennessey says

It’s the DUP what won it....Make no mistake, Gordon Brown has been saved from humiliation by a hair's breadth tonight. Only the nine votes of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists - who marched into the Aye lobby at the last moment - rescued him, with 37 Labour MPs rebelling against the PM's 42-day detention plan for terrorist suspects.

The Government and the Unionists insist though that no deal has been done



Bucking the trend though is Philip Cowley at Open House who says

When the Government win by nine, and there’s nine DUP MPs in the lobby with them, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that it was the DUP wot won it. But take a closer look at the list of Labour MPs who voted against the government tonight, and it’s clear that the reason for their victory is more complicated than that.
The list of 36 rebels is noticeable for those who are missing. Of the 49 Labour backbenchers who voted against the Government in November 2005, when they went down to defeat on the Terrorism Bill, only 29 did so tonight. Note the absence from the rebel lobby of people like John Austin, David Hamilton, Chris McCafferty, George Mudie, Dennis Skinner, David Taylor, Jon Trickett, Ann Cryer, Mick Clapham. Some of these will have abstained, others will have backed the Government – but they didn’t vote against this time

Adam Boulton points out that

A win is a win.
Gordon Brown is moving on swiftly, holding his news conference tomorrow, when he will doubtless claim he has done the right thing on principle, backed by public opinion, and suggest that David Cameron's Conservatives are opportunistic and soft on terrorism.

However the last word to the Guardian's editorial which describes it as a shaming victory

The prime minister has squandered parliamentary time, goodwill and his reputation as a man of principle on a symbolic sacrifice of liberty. That sacrifice is gratuitous, a vote on a law that would not work, is not needed and which, quite possibly, will never come into force.