Splintered Sunrise

Tonight we’re going to pose a serious, high-minded question for all of you serious, high-minded political scientists out there. The question is this: do the Ulster Unionist Party have any fucking cop on at all?

Regular readers will realise that we’re about to take another trip into the wacky world of the Ulster Conservative and Unionist New Force. And yea, it is so – but the question is a genuine one. And it may also be fairly aimed at Rankin’ Dave Cameron, who thought allying with the Unionist Party was a good idea in the first place. If David Trimble could con him into the UCUNF boondoggle, perhaps Trimble will next try to sell him a bridge. Perhaps he already has.

Anyway, you know the basic outlines of the story. David Cameron and Reg Empey sign an electoral pact, which gives Cameron a ready-made party in the north – at least one more substantial than the actually existing Ulster Tories, whose 25 years of hard work have enabled them to accumulate around 250 members and scarcely more votes – while Reggie gets a bit of Ashcroft money and a ready-made narrative of pan-UK non-sectarian civic unionism, something to fire up his grassroots (or at least the unionist blogosphere) and distinguish his party from the dominant DUP. However, Reggie and his new mate “Dave” have had a few problems along the way, illustrated by candidate selection, arising both from the pact itself and from Reggie’s difficulty in sticking to the pact – he has had a tendency to let himself be distracted by shiny new electoral pacts, whether with the DUP or even (putatively) with Jim Allister’s Prodiban. Out of our eighteen constituencies, no less than three can give us telling case studies.

North Down: the Lady’s not for UCUNFing
Reggie went into the UCUNF pact with one (1) incumbent MP. That was Lady Sylvia Hermon in North Down. She’s been a capable MP and is popular well beyond the ranks of the Unionist Party; she also had a totemic standing within the party as the woman who had kept a UUP toehold at Westminster when the Dupes were sweeping all before them, and who had defeated Bob “Cream Bun” McCartney in so doing.

If you were looking for a candidate who exemplifies what civic unionism might be – non-sectarian, moderate, outward-looking – you might think Sylvia was the ideal candidate. But you’d be wrong, because, unfortunately for Reggie, Sylvia is a stalwart Labour supporter and refused to stand as a Tory candidate under any circumstances. And while Reggie could easily write off his party’s socialist wing (Roy Garland and Chris McGimpsey) as yesterday’s men who had nowhere else to go, Sylvia’s position and popularity would be more of an obstacle. Despite pressure from the UUP’s Toryboy wing, who’ve been agitating for years to have Sylvia driv out of the party, Reggie played the long game – or procrastinated, if you prefer. This only made the Toryboy element crazier, while Sylvia treated her leader with barely-concealed contempt. During last year’s party conference, not only did she not bother to attend but she ostentatiously allowed herself to be photographed doing something much more important – walking her dogs.

But time waits for no man, and eventually Reggie had to get off the pot. And so it is that Sylvia has departed the party, followed by the North Down constituency chairman and her proxy in the Assembly, Major Alan McFarland (they do love their titles, the North Down voters), both of them decrying the whole UCUNF project as they walked out the door. Sylvia plans to run as an independent; the UCUNF nomination has gone to the affable if lightweight Tory contender, Ian “Not Paisley” Parsley, who was European candidate for the Alliance Party less than a year ago. Whether the depleted and demoralised North Down UUA will break its collective back for Parsley remains to be seen; meanwhile, the DUP, with their unerring sense for a chance to rub Reggie’s nose in it, are standing down in Sylvia’s favour. This observer is willing to have a small flutter on Sylvia beating the crap out of young Parsley on polling day.

The net result is that Reggie has not only deprived himself of his sole sitting MP for a mess of pottage called UCUNF, but he’s managed to look weak and indecisive for putting it off so long. The funny thing is that Fred Cobain, an unreconstructed Labour Unionist, has been given the UCUNF nomination in North Belfast – but then, Fred isn’t going to win.

South Antrim: the bed and breakfast man
We covered this one recently. Basically, the UCUNF selection process called for both component parties to select a candidate, both of whom would then go before a joint committee which would decide which one got to represent the Forza Nuova on the ballot paper. It was a complex and tortuous process, but one which (we were told) would weed out obvious wingnuts, and David McNarry. This would be especially important in South Antrim, the party’s number one target constituency and something of a bellwether. For many years the area was represented by veteran UUP man Clifford Forsythe; on Clifford’s death in 2000, the by-election was narrowly won by the DUP’s Rev William McCrea; in the 2001 general election McCrea was narrowly edged out by the UUP’s David Burnside; in the 2005 DUP landslide McCrea won again, but again only narrowly.

So, something of a cockpit seat, and, given the TUV insurgency and the local unpopularity of Singing Willie, one that should be well within UCUNF’s grasp. But then you factor in candidate selection.

In the UUP selection process, Antrim mayor Adrian Watson was the runaway winner with around 90% of party votes. Antrim unionists love their mayor; the guy has a bit of dynamism about him; and, for what it’s worth, he’s very popular with the flute band community in the Antrim area. The problem is that he’s also the proprietor of a bed and breakfast. And, in connection with that, a few years back he was talking on the wireless to Stephen Nolan and happened to mention that he wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of having gay couples staying the night.

Well, that rang alarm bells with the Tories, who have been frenetically courting the pink vote, and who promptly vetoed Watson – they couldn’t have a candidate with such unfashionable views on Teh Gayz, although his anti-Irish and anti-Traveller views apparently weren’t problematic. What muddied the waters even further was Chris Grayling’s musings on the same subject. (Chekov, in his role as the UUP’s resident Chief Wiggum, argued that the two cases were completely different because Watson had a history of making gormless outbursts and Grayling… um…) But defenestrating Watson carried with it some dangers, such as having to run an anonymous Tory candidate, or the possibility of a thoroughly pissed-off Watson running as an independent. Not what you’d consider ideal in your most realistic target seat.

This is the background to Reggie finally growing a pair and volunteering to take on Singing Willie himself. This is a high-risk strategy for Reggie – if he doesn’t win, that’s the end of his leadership. Not to mention that Reggie himself may have, well, not entirely PC opinions on the bed and breakfast question. It would be a terrible pity if, say, Gay Times were to find out and to give Cameron a hard time about it.

Fermanagh and South Tyrone: the ground zero of the sectarian headcount
One of the conditions of the UCUNF pact was the pledge to stand candidates in all eighteen constituencies. The theory behind this is that everybody in the north should have an opportunity to vote for the next UK government. But that cuts little ice down in Fermanagh, where the sectarian jungle drums have been beating loudly. Since 2001, the abstentionist MP for the area has been Sinn Féin’s Michelle Gildernew; but, though it’s a nationalist-majority seat, unionists (resting on a Protestant population of around 45%) have held it in the past with a split nationalist vote. (And vice versa. As long as both unionist parties ran candidates, Michelle would coast back in.) Such is the sectarian polarisation down in FST that this is where the pressure for a “unionist unity” (that is, pan-Prod) candidate was always going to be strongest. As a result, we’ve had several months of rather wearying megaphone diplomacy between the UUP’s Tom Elliott and the DUP’s Arlene Foster, each challenging the other to stand down for the greater good.

And in the background, the search for a neutral Prod to carry the challenge. First there was an attempt to conscript retired RUC detective Norman Baxter, but Norman declared that, while he would be interested in being a cross-community candidate, he had no interest in being a pan-Prod one. Finally, though, they have got their saviour in the shape of recently retired Fermanagh Council chief executive Rodney Connor, who will run as an independent but take the Tory whip if elected. This in itself isn’t a foregone conclusion – he will need to mobilise a solid bloc of unionist voters while hoping that SDLP-voting Catholics don’t desert their party and rally behind Michelle Gildernew.

What’s important about this is that, despite the figleaf of Rodney Connor promising to take the Tory whip, this makes a liar of David Cameron. It is explicitly a sectarian stitch-up – exactly the sort of thing UCUNF was supposed to be a break from, hence the eighteen-candidate pledge. A couple of Tories and Unionists have smelt a rat, though Chief Wiggum is undeterred – he simply wants Connor to play up his cross-community credentials so as to reassure SDLP-voting Catholics into believing that Connor isn’t the pan-Prod candidate, even though that’s exactly what he is. Evidently the theory is that Fermanagh nationalists are too thick to spot a sectarian stitch-up when they see one, and choose to back their own “unity” candidate no matter whether the SDLP stays in the running.

Interesting, too, was the Tory statement on FST, which described the constituency as being deprived of “democratic representation” – which evinces not a little contempt for the democratic choice of the 18,000 people who voted for Michelle Gildernew, not to mention that anyone who’s had contact with our hyperactive agriculture minister could hardly accuse her of not bothering to represent her constituents. The Tories further argued that this was the only one of the five abstentionist-held constituencies where a pact could alter the outcome – in other words, in West Belfast, West Tyrone, Mid Ulster and Newry/Armagh there just weren’t enough Prods to win. This demonstrates a complete buying into the logic of Prod-counting, and makes a nonsense of the logic of UCUNF.

And now, it’s spreading. Mark Devenport reports that the Orange Order and Royal Black Preceptory in Sandy Row have delivered an ultimatum to Reggie, the gist of which is that if he doesn’t endorse a pan-Prod candidate in South Belfast they will organise a boycott of UCUNF standard-bearer Paula Bradshaw, while the candidate herself is buckling. And this is all about unseating the non-abstentionist, anti-republican, but still inconveniently Catholic, Alasdair McDonnell. David Cameron has walked right into the sectarian morass of Norn Iron politics, and he only has himself to blame.

If you can’t wait for more election coverage here, there’s plenty in the proper media. I draw your attention in particular to Newt on the plus ça change theme; Chris on the dilemmas facing Margaret Ritchie; and Ben Lowry has a fascinating piece on differential turnout.

I’m not going to write anything about the current discussions at Hillsborough until something emerges – and even when something does, it’s likely to be a holding operation. Rather, I want to focus on these secret Tory-Unionist talks two Sundays back.

There were two things that immediately struck me about the Hatfield House talks. One was to ask, “Why on earth would the Tories and Unionists hold a top-secret summit in a pub on the Ormeau Road?” Then I realised the reference was in fact to Lord Cranborne’s stately pile. The second thing was that it was a bit cheeky of the DUP to tell the Shinners they wanted a break from the policing and justice negotiations, on the grounds that they didn’t negotiate on the Sabbath, only to head off to a get-together with Reg Empey and Owen Paterson.

Little detail has emerged from the Hatfield talks except that electoral matters were discussed. This would appear to have three dimensions – an electoral arrangement to maximise the number of unionist MPs returned to Westminster; an arrangement to support the Tories in the event of a close or inconclusive result at the general election; and some sort of wheeze to prevent Martin McGuinness becoming first minister after the next Stormont election. But there’s some unpicking to be done here in terms of what’s in it for Peter, what’s in it for Reggie, and what’s in it for Dave.

To begin with Rankin’ Dave Cameron, his reasoning is absurdly transparent. With the polls pointing to either a hung parliament or a slim Tory majority, what he wants is to gain the assured votes of ten or so unionist MPs. This is of a piece with his thinking on UCUNF in the first place, which as far as I could see had more to do with Scotland than the north – the big selling point being the rash pledge to run eighteen Forza Nuova candidates over here, thus underlining his dispositional unionism with a low-overhead gesture of his pan-UK credentials. It all confirms my view of Rankin’ Dave as a perishing lightweight, and not just because of the question of whether he can be an honest broker in government, something that an attempt to recreate the UUUC would naturally undermine – he should really go and have a talk with John Major about what it’s like to have to rely on unionist votes. Any Tory grandee with a bit of sense could have told him that getting mixed up with the Unionist Party would be more trouble than it was worth. Since Andrew Bonar Law stood with Carson a century ago and incited armed insurrection against the elected British government, the Unionists have always meant trouble.

Peter’s motivation is easy to understand. His primary concern is Jim Allister, his secondary concern is to spook the Shinners. If he manages to get an electoral pact, well and good – such a pact would work to the DUP’s advantage given its incumbency advantage, higher-quality cadre and the fact that it can easily sacrifice candidacies in South Belfast and Fermanagh/South Tyrone, seats the DUP wasn’t going to win anyway; if he doesn’t… well, he’s no worse off that he was to begin with, and he knows that any raising of the “unionist unity” banner, with him managing to inveigle Reggie into discussions on the matter, raises a fatal question mark over the logic behind the UCUNF boondoggle. This proves once again that Peter is smarter than Reggie, or indeed Dave.

Which brings me to the question of what the fuck Reg Empey thinks he’s doing. I think you have to look at this in terms of the schizophrenic strategies pursued by the OUP in recent years. At Stormont, they’ve alternated between hankering after the old coalition of the centre – that is to say themselves, the SDLP and Alliance, with the Dupes and Shinners relegated back to the margins – by forging a close working relationship with the SDLP; and on the other hand, flirting with Jim Allister and trying without much success to outflank the DUP on the right.

This all has to do with the confusion of a party that used to be a monolithic catch-all party for Prods, trying to reinvent itself in an environment where the DUP has outpaced it. Hence the Ulster Conservative and Unionist New Force, which may be a dopey idea, but that’s not to be scorned in a party that’s been bereft of ideas for a very long time – and indeed, never used to need them.

The ever readable Turgon had some interesting thoughts on this over on Slugger:

The battle between the UUP and DUP has been going on for years. It must be remembered that forty years ago Dr. Paisley was a marginal figure and when the unionist monolith began to fracture the likes of Bill Craig were actually much more senior and significant figures within unionism than the Big Man. However, the DUP prospered more than any of the other pretenders to the UUP throne of lead unionist party. Any attempt by the UUP to move “leftwards” (as an aside I find the designation of hard line unionism as right wing and its opposite left wing irritating and inaccurate but it is a useful shorthand) resulted in segments of unionism moving towards the DUP or else the UUP splitting and moving back rightwards.

Hence, I would argue, Jim Allister. As long as unionist politics exists there will be a DUP or something like it – indeed, the TUV now is more or less a functional equivalent of the DUP as it was forty years ago.

Although comparisons with Nelson are spectacularly inapt, the unionist leader who managed to do a Battle of the Nile on the DUP, was of course Jim Molyneaux. Molyneaux used to say that he had contained Dr. Paisley because he had “out righted” him. That was not, however, entirely accurate; rather what Molyneaux achieved was to have a broad church party which managed simultaneously to be more right wing than the DUP (e.g. Willie Ross) but had many members much more liberal to hoover up the more moderate unionist vote (Ken Maginnis). It also appealed to the Orange vote (Rev. Martin Smith) and had proper fundamentalists (Nelson McCausland); yet had a few Catholics (John Gorman); was right wing (Enoch Powell) and yet socialist (Chris McGimpsey) and even with working class roots (Harold McCusker). This eclectic mix allowed Molyneaux to offer a party which had members who could resonate with practically all unionists and for a significant time he reaped the electorate rewards, steadily eroding the DUP vote in all save the European elections where Dr. Paisley gained a huge personality vote.

Old Lemonsucker was a smarter man than he was given credit for, and understood better than anyone since Brookeborough the nature of leadership in unionism. Brookeborough, you’ll recall, was prime minister for twenty years, during which time his usual routine was to spend one morning a week at Stormont dealing with correspondence, and the rest of his time hunting foxes down in Fermanagh. Jim Molyneaux famously once issued a statement to say that he wouldn’t be issuing any more statements for the foreseeable future. That’s why he could hold his anarchic party together, while the more dynamic David Trimble couldn’t.

Since that the UUP have largely tried to regain their position by being more moderate than the DUP and have gone on a long, largely fruitless quest for that mythical beast: the garden centre Prod along with the apparently equally unicorn like unionist Catholic. By the tie up with the Conservatives they seem to think that they had created a formula which would attract both sorts of unicorn and tame them to become the white chargers they needed to reclaim their rightful place as lead unionist party. To be fair they have gained some Catholic members and increased their profile. However, at their first outing in the European election, they owed their relative defeat of the DUP more to the TUV’s slicing off approaching a half of the DUP’s vote than to any huge increase in their own support. The ogres of the TUV had had more effect on the victory than the unicorns.

Well, neither of these creatures is entirely mythical, and UCUNF did bring a few of them out of the woodwork, as well as energising the OUP’s Toryboy wing, who have seized on the idea of pan-UK non-sectarian civic unionism with a link to Cameron as the magic formula that would outflank the Dupes while somehow persuading nationalists to become unionists. But there’s also the call of the jungle drums, which is where the unionist unity drive comes in. Reggie’s problem is that these two impulses are contradictory.

You see this with the candidacy problems. The New Force has a tortuous candidate selection process; but beyond that, the Unionist part thereof has still not sorted out its selections, thanks largely to the situation in North Down where Lady Sylvia is not for UCUNFing. As a result, the tiny Ulster Tories have got utterly pissed off at the Unionists’ failure, a few months before an election, to have candidates in place. Their mood has not been improved by this dalliance with the DUP, after they’d been assured by both Dave and Reggie that UCUNF would be contesting all eighteen seats here. So now we’ve seen the withdrawal of three Tory candidates, two of whom – Peter McCann and Sheila Davidson – are Catholic. Reggie swears blind that he’s not shafting Catholic Tories for the sake of a pan-Prod electoral stitch-up, but the Hatfield talks don’t provide the best backdrop.

There is another factor, that of UCUNF’s supposed appeal to the Garden Centre Prod and the Catholic Unionist. You may object that, to the extent that these creatures exist, most of them are in the Alliance Party, but that’s not the point. The point is that they have some significance for candidate selection, and the latter have a disproportionate significance. Peter McCann, the Catholic Tory from west Belfast, was a totemic figure for UCUNF not because he was going to win over loads of Catholics to the unionist cause; his role was to be our local analogue to Shaun Bailey, the black Tory who’s standing in Hammersmith. Now, black Londoners remain in their huge majority loyal to Labour, and most of them seem to regard Shaun Bailey as a chancer on the make, but Shaun isn’t being heavily promoted for the benefit of black Londoners. If he wins a few over, well and good, but Shaun has to be put in the context of Cameron’s detoxification of the Tory brand. Thus, Shaun is being targeted at white middle-class Londoners of liberal disposition who want to be reassured that the Tories aren’t racist any more; Peter McCann could have appealed to Garden Centre Prods who otherwise would abstain or vote Alliance, as a reassurance that UCUNF wasn’t sectarian.

It goes further than that, of course. Word is circulating that Reggie is headhunting Trevor Ringland to stand in East Belfast, and TV’s Mike Nesbitt to stand in Strangford. These boys, should they run, would be aimed squarely at the Garden Centre Prod vote; but they would be good candidates for a non-sectarian, middle-of-the-road politic, and probably wouldn’t be interested in anything that looks even vaguely like an exercise in sectarian headcounting. And then, look at Sylvia Hermon herself. She’s presentable, articulate, moderate in her politics and a transparently decent human being – she also has the advantage of being a Chief Constable’s widow in a constituency full of cops who served under Sir Jack. She’d actually be an ideal “civic unionist” candidate, if it wasn’t for her unfortunate refusal to stand as a Tory under any circumstances. Then again, she’d be equally plausible as an Alliance candidate, and even as an independent should certainly not be written off.

Beyond the implications for the OUP, there’s a broader peace process implication. If your strategy is based on the coalition of the centre, or voluntary coalition (and we know which party that’s designed to exclude), you need a cross-community partner. Specifically, you need a substantial SDLP. Now, the SDLP as is may be beyond help, but you should be wary of taking steps that actually hammer more nails into its coffin. The first effect of a unionist electoral pact would be to knock out Alasdair McDonnell, the man best placed to revive the SDLP. Secondly, even if you manage to knock out Michelle Gildernew – and, given her popularity with Fermanagh farmers, that’s no certainty – in the process Michelle would squeeze the SDLP in Fermanagh/South Tyrone into oblivion, with a likely knock-on effect for neighbouring constituencies. More generally, anything that looks like a revival of UUUC politics is a huge incentive to nationalists to rally behind the party that promises to most aggressively represent Catholic rights – and that ain’t the SDLP. What price a coalition of the centre, if the SDLP is too enfeebled to be of any use?

Finally, the hard fact is that seats at Stormont are more important by far than seats at Westminster. The big prize is a unionist bloc at Stormont that would prevent Marty being elected first minister – which is entirely symbolic in terms of the actual joint powers of the OFMDFM. Then again, if I read the d’Hondt system correctly, that may actually cost unionism in terms of Executive ministers, and McGuinness would still hold a position in the joint presidency that meant the FM couldn’t do anything without his consent.

Did I say Peter was smarter than Reggie? It could be that Reggie, in his chasing after short-term tactical advantage, is being too clever for his own good.