The good news from last week is that austerity is over, at least, it is if you live in Northern Ireland. Theresa May’s weak government has been forced to buy the votes of 10 MPs from the Democratic Unionist Party in order to cling to power and at £100m a pop, they didn’t come cheap.

The £1bn deal is just the latest sorry episode in the story of a prime minister who has lost her authority and a government that has lost the ability to govern effectively.

If it wasn’t already obvious, the lack of ambition shown in the Queen’s Speech laid bare the inability of the Conservatives to enact their manifesto. There was no mention of the hated dementia tax, nothing about removing the pension triple lock, the plan to bring back grammar schools has been scrapped and there was not a peep about fox hunting.

This is fantastic news and has been achieved thanks to the millions of people across the country who voted Labour and denied Theresa May the landslide majority that she arrogantly believed she was entitled to. But a government that is unable carry a majority for its own agenda is hardly one that is in a strong position to lead Britain into the crucial negotiations on Brexit.

But if the reason for this deal with the DUP is one of necessity, the result has been deep unfairness. It is certainly true that there has been relative underinvestment in Northern Ireland for many years, and that the geography of the nation mean it requires extra funding for transport and other areas. But the same could be said of many places in England, not least Cumbria. It is impossible to argue that we are less of priority given the state of our roads and rail links which have suffered from underinvestment for years.

I have calculated that the deal with the DUP would mean an extra £278m for Cumbria if the funding was done fairly. This would be a massive boost. It could be used to upgrade our creaking rail links, to eliminate broadband blackspots or to close about half of the deficit faced by the local NHS. It is serious money and the government should take us seriously when we ask for it. People in Cumbria are fed up of being told to wait our turn for investment when we see huge spending on projects in London and the south. The government must not continue to ignore us as they did when they left Cumbria out of their Northern Powerhouse project.

But more than anything this deal has exposed duplicity of the government when they claim there is no money in the bank. For years they have told our nurses that they can’t afford to give them a pay rise, they have told us that our schools must be cut and that free school lunches for children are unaffordable. But £1bn was not too hard to find when the survival of the government depended on it. The public will have taken note.

The government may have already scrapped half of their manifesto, but I fully intend to honour the commitments I made in the election campaign. I said that I would fight to protect and improve our schools and hospitals and the staff who work there, and last week I voted to scrap the pay cap that has undermined the morale and damaged recruitment of nurses and teachers. I also said that I would work for a Brexit deal that puts our local economy first, and over the coming months I will be arguing for retaining the benefits of European co-operation in the nuclear and pharmaceutical sectors that provide so many jobs here in Furness.