The DUP leader, the Rev Ian Paisley, has predicted that the British government will suspend the North's Assembly, Executive and the other institutions set up under the terms of the Belfast Agreement.
After a meeting with the British Prime Minister, Dr Paisley said he believed suspension would be London's course of action in light of Mr David Trimble's threat to resign on July 1st in the absence of movement on decommissioning by the IRA. The DUP leader, accompanied by Mr Nigel Dodds and Mr Gregory Campbell, met Mr Blair and the Northern Secretary, Dr John Reid, in Downing Street yesterday. After the hour-long meeting, Dr Paisley said: "I think they will suspend, I have taken from some hints that I heard today that they will suspend. He didn't believe Trimble's ministers could keep their jobs if the leader did resign." However, Dr Reid dismissed this, saying that suspension had not been discussed during the meeting with the DUP.
"It is not my intention to be thinking about closing down elements of the Good Friday agreement." The meeting was "civil and courteous", he said.
Dr Paisley said that the meeting was without shouting. "We put our view as forcibly as we could." His party presented the British Prime Minister with a document called "An Alternative Process". Mr Blair agreed to study it and respond in the future.
It says a central element of British government policy is that any settlement must have the majority support of both communities. Therefore, on the British government's own terms, it was not enough that 71 per cent of the North's population voted for the agreement.
In the Westminster elections, a majority supported anti-agreement candidates, the document states.
Meanwhile, President Bush's special envoy to Ireland, Mr Richard Hass, had talks in London with Dr Reid and then flew to Belfast for two-day discussions with political parties to see if Washington could break the political deadlock.
At a London press conference, Mr Haas stressed the solution lay in the Good Friday Agreement and said the US would support the process. He added there was "no magic bullet, no secret plan in Washington" to solve the remaining problems.