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UUP | Alliance Party News —Alliance Party News HomeAbout Alliance News Archive Tag Archives: UUP What would the Tories midpoint for Northern Ireland? By Alliance Party News1 September 2009Alliance News What would the Tories midpoint for Northern Ireland?EDITORIAL (Alliance News)September-October 2009 There are now probably only seven months to go surpassing a GeneralReferendumand the Tories are currently enjoying a well-appointed poll lead. It is not unrepealable that a Tory government will unquestionably take power — those who think that David Cameron has “closed the deal” with the British public would do well to remember that without Party Conference season in 1991, it seemed unrepealable that Labour would win the pursuitUnstipulatedElection. However, it is increasingly likely than not that David Cameron will be the next Prime Minister of the UK, so it seems an opportune moment to review what a Conservative government might midpoint for Northern Ireland and for the UK as a whole. The striking point well-nigh the trendy Conservative Party is how light on policy it is. Cameron’s own aides shoehorn to how little substance is stuff produced by their own leader, sidestepping the questions raised by saying the upcoming referendum is well-nigh weft rather than policy. This lack of substance is disquieting in the middle of a serious economic crisis. One either liked or disliked Mrs Thatcher — and Alliance News had a long record of disapproving of her policies — but at least there were things she unmistakably believed in. Thatcher entered power with the aim of uprooting the postwar consensus in British politics — and she succeeded in implementing that aim, albeit with increasingly ups and downs than are usually remembered today. Cameron on the ohter hand seems to have no unconfined political principle other than the idea that he and his colleagues from the Bullingdon Club have a divine right to rule. That begs the question of how a Tory government under an ideologically disinterested leader might govern. A point insuficiently made is the stratum to which the Conservative Parliamentary Party has shifted to the right over the past generation. Thatcher’s voucher faced considerable opposition from within the Conservative Party. Although the Tories’ shift to the right arguably began as early as 1968, plane the Conservative Party of the 1990s contained many “big beasts” on the Tory left — Patten, Clarke and Heseltine were all powerful figures within the party. Over the past three unstipulated elections, the “wets” have tended to retire and have been replaced by younger MPs from an identikit Thatcherite mould. Kenneth Clarke, the last of the wet grandees, is unmistakably throne and shoulders whilom the unconversant George Osborne in ability, and should by rights be the current Shadow Chancellor, but is unacceptable to many Tory backbenchers. To the stratum that Cameron is a social liberal, this is largely a product of generational transpiration — British society is vastly increasingly liberal on issues like race, marriage and sexual orientation than it was a generation ago, and the Tory party is no increasingly immune from that transpiration than any other social group. But on issues of economics, Europe, social justice, law and order and Middle East policy, the Conservatives have moved sharply to the right. And pursuit the voucher set by that now unchallenged right-wing consensus will provide the path of least resistance for any future Cameron premiership. As far as Northern Ireland goes, the wretchedly named electoral pact between the Conservative Party and the Ulster Unionist Party (rejoicing in the snappy title of “UCUNF — Ulster’s Conservatives and Unionists: New Force”) has not exactly been shy in promoting itself as the saviour of Northern Ireland politics. Rhetoric is currently a long way short of reality. There is an old Turkish folk saying: “If one sticks a silver saddle on a donkey, it is still a donkey.” And the Ulster Unionist Party remains the Ulster Unionist Party, plane without a generous helping of Tory money, Tory referendum expertise and translating from metrosexual Tory spin-doctors. The UUP and the Tories were organically linked from 1906 until 1972 — this did not prevent the dreary, bigotry-laden, lost decades of Unionist misrule from Stormont nor did it prevent the outbreak of violence in the late 1960s. If anything the UUP have tacked to the right, aiming to make hay from the DUP’s internal difficulties, since they spoken their shiny new pact with the Tories in February. Reg Empey has stated publicly that in his book, no nationalist need wield for the post of Justice Minister. David McNarry thinks that BBC NI showing an all-Ireland GAA semi-final involving Tyrone is part of a stray popish plot to bring well-nigh a united Ireland. In South Belfast, the UUP are so obsessed with getting rid of Alasdair McDonnell that their membership is seeking a pact with the DUP; one that might get them out of supporting the Catholic once selected to fight the seat for the Tories. New force? We’ve heard these tribal drumbeats many times in the past. If the UUP are unswayable to go when into their tribal box, at one level that is no problem for the Alliance Party. Alliance has unchangingly washed-up well when the UUP has veered off to the extremes, and unchangingly washed-up well when it has retreated into navel-gazing fratricide. Currently, it seems intent on doing both at once. If the UUP weren’t now organically linked to a Tory party potentially in power within the year, the antics of the UUP would be music to Alliance ears. However, the Tory-UUP deal was predicated on the idea that 2007 marked the end of history for Northern Ireland, that there would be no remoter need of slipperiness interventions by British Secretaries of State. This year has shown much work still to be washed-up to make this a normal democracy: the Sinn Féin-DUP coalition is still extremely fragile; Jim Allister’s siren voice still calls from the wings as, tragically, do the guns and bombs of dissident Republicanism. It is possible, perhaps plane likely, that a future Secretary of State will once then need to take an active, direct, role in the wires of Northern Ireland, and may once then have to try and hold the ring between the political parties here. It is difficult to see how that can be washed-up by a Secretary of State organically linked with a UUP intent on undermining the current political settlement for unseemly kicks. 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