The unprecedented scandal surrounding former DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson, who has been convicted of 18 counts of sexual abuse against children – including one count of rape – has shaken the DUP to its very core.
For the first time in five years, the latest opinion polls have failed to place the DUP as the most popular unionist party. And in all likelihood, the fallout has only just begun.
Having since its very beginning touted itself as the party of ‘Christian family values’, Donaldson’s conviction has exposed the utter hypocrisy of an organisation that has in recent years seemingly been rocked by one scandal after another.
Subsequent inquiries into the DUP’s knowledge of Donaldson’s crimes and ‘sex pest’ behaviour more generally are revealing just how much the party’s top brass already knew.
Though there is currently no suggestion that anyone except his wife and senior members of the Presbyterian Church were aware of the crimes he’s been convicted for, a lot more has since come out. Speaker of the Assembly and (short-lived) former party leader Edwin Poots has come under scrutiny for his role in sweeping claims of ‘exploitation’ by Donaldson under the rug in 2021. An alleged victim has also pointed the finger at Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly, claiming that she had been warned by Pengelly that Donaldson posed a danger.
Though the party leadership is scurrying for cover, desperately vying to rescue a dire situation – the damage has already been done.
DUP voters are appalled and outraged at the shameless duplicity of Donaldson and his unionist establishment ilk. Already, a LucidTalk poll has shown a further collapse in support for the DUP of 3 percentage points, placing them 1 percent behind the UUP. A whopping 70 percent of voters don’t believe that the DUP’s internal review will establish the full truth about Donaldson’s criminal actions and the party’s handling of them.
A Lisburn based café worker when asked stated, “I’ve always voted DUP but never again. Jeffrey Donaldson is a big part of it.”
A resident from Dromare – where Donaldson used to live – explained: “A lot of the comments during the trial were around his professed Christian faith. That’s upset a lot of people round here as they’re church goers. I think they feel particularly betrayed.”
Donaldson was a core pillar of the unionist establishment as the longest serving MP in Westminster from the North. His downfall and the resulting fallout from the “nuclear explosion in political terms” as described by founding DUP member Wallace Thompson – may damage the DUP beyond repair.
The problem for the DUP is that this is not just about Donaldson. The hypocrisy, the conspiracy of silence surrounding his duplicity, and the preaching of one set of values while behaving according to another only further confirm what ordinary people are increasingly coming to understand: that the DUP’s pious rhetoric about ‘Christian family values’ is nothing more than a hypocritical facade concealing the rotten reality of the establishment it represents.
The past few years have, if anything, laid bare the true nature of the capitalist ruling class. The Epstein files have exposed a rotten system in which extraordinary wealth, power and connections protect the powerful, even from allegations of horrific sexual abuse and exploitation.
Donaldson and the DUP leadership are part of that same Epstein class that for decades acted with impunity. In order to bring them all to true justice, they must be overthrown through the socialist revolution.
