Alliance Party and the Unionists

Last week there were two events that highlighted what unionists care about or, more accurately, what they fear. First, the leader of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), a loyalist paramilitary party linked to the Ulster Volunteer Front (UVF), Billy Hutchinson, gave an interview in which he said that he did not regret the two murders for which he was convicted and served time in prison because they helped prevent a united Ireland. The murders were of two Catholic teenagers, picked out at random and killed for being Catholic. Both the UVF and its smaller satellite Red Hand Commandos and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) had a strategy of killing random Catholics as reprisals for republican terrorist and guerrilla actions on the theory that this would put pressure on ordinary Catholics to not cooperate with republican paramilitaries. Here is some nationalist reaction to the interview.

A few days later Anna Lo, the Alliance member of the Assembly for South Belfast and its candidate in the upcoming European Parliament elections, gave an interview in which she said she was in favor of a united Ireland and that she saw Northern Ireland as an "artificial colonial entity." Guess which of these two interviews was more upsetting to unionists?

Haass Talks in Northern Ireland Begin

This week former George W. Bush administration special envoy to Northern Ireland Richard Haass began what is slated to be twelve weeks of intermittent consultations with the five parties in Northern Ireland's Executive. The talks will be conducted in rounds with Haass flying in to Belfast from New York several times a month to conduct them. The talks will focus on three key stumbling blocks to progress in the peace process: parades, flags and emblems, and dealing with the past. 

As part of the Northern Ireland peace process in the late 1990s a quango (quasi non-governmental organization--a body financed by the government but with independence like an NGO) known as the Parades Commission was created to deal with the problem of parades regulation during the marching season. Every year it receives requests for parade permits stating the date, time, route, and details of a proposed parade. Local residents along the parade route are free to submit objections and the Parades Commission then makes a ruling. Only a few parades in Northern Ireland--those involving Protestants marching through Catholic areas--are controversial. At present these are mainly in North Belfast, which is an area of alternating nationalist and unionist neighborhoods criss-crossed with peace walls in order to protect the residents from missiles from the other side. The Orange Order has refused to hold dialogues with residents' groups contending that its members have an absolute right to march on the "Queen's highway." Since the mid-1990s when the controversies were at their height over the Drumcree Church march outside of Portadown in north Co. Armagh, in the Lower Ormeau area of South Belfast, and in Derry in Co. Londonderry, the number of controversial parades has been gradually reduced.

The Fate of Northern Ireland's New Pro-Union Party

Back in March I had a post about a new party being formed by two defectors from the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), Basil McCrea and John MacCallister, who had left the UUP over its decision to support an agreed unionist candidate in the mid-Ulster by-election. In May the party had its formal launch, but it still has yet to come up with a name for itself. Its main niche marketing distinction is that it advertises itself to be "pro-Union" rather than unionist, thus hoping to position itself somewhere between Alliance, which is agnostic or neutral on the border question, and the UUP. 

The Northern Ireland/British Isles blog Slugger O'Toole did a post on the launch of the party. The consensus on the thread was that in the next election McCrea would be reelected but MacCallister would lose to a UUP or DUP candidate. This in because McCrea seems to have a strong personal following in his constituency, whereas MacCallister was elected on the strength of the UUP as a party and will now lose to the party's replacement nominee. This will make the new party a one-man affair like Jim Allister's Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) and the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP). The TUV represents the old DUP under Paisley before he did a 180 and entered into the Executive with Sinn Fein. The PUP represents a socialist unionism aimed at the loyalist working class. It is also vaguely connected with the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) paramilitary organization out of which many of its representatives and leadership emerged, such as the late David Ervine and present leader Billy Hutchinson. Can the new party under McCrea find enough of a niche to survive?

Loyalist paramilitaries demonstrate their strength

East Belfast witnessed on Saturday a parade by some 10,000 commemorators of the centenary of the founding of the original Ulster Volunteer Force in 1913. Over thirty flute, fife and drum bands marched in the parade along with those in period costumes dressed as soldiers and nurses of the UVF. This is part of the centenary decade of commemorations dealing with the creation of Northern Ireland as a province within the United Kingdom separate from the rest of Ireland. At the ceremony the granddaughter of James Craig aka Lord Craigavon, the first prime minister of Northern Ireland, spoke as did Billy Hutchinson, a former double-murderer, loyalist prisoner and present leader of the Progressive Unionist Party, which has a single member in the Assembly. Click here and here for stories on the parade. The parade seems to have been also intended as a show of force by the modern-day Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a terrorist group founded in 1966 and the main loyalist paramilitary organization during The Troubles.

What to call Basil's New Party?

Now that it has been officially announced that Basil McCrea and John McCallister, the two rebel former Ulster Unionists and former unsuccessful UUP leadership candidates, will be forming their own party, I offer this blogpost as an open strategy memo to the two.

The two of you have three main tasks between now and the official launch of your party. First, you must decide on a name. This will presumably reflect the party's identity as both non-sectarian and pro-union. The BBC headline announcing your decision illustrates the dilemma that you face. It said that you weren't just forming a new party, but a new "unionist party." To any nationalist voter this means automatically that you are not non-sectarian, but sectarian--the mirror image of the SDLP. (If you don't believe me think of a splinter party from the SDLP that described itself as a "non-sectarian nationalist" party.) You can declare yourself to be pro-union all you want as long as you don't have unionist in the name. That means that you should concentrate on your ideological message: something with either liberal or progressive in the name. But the PUP may have spoiled the label progressive as much as the existing unionist parties have spoiled the label unionist. I suggest you take a hint from the English-speaking "white" colonies in Southern Africa. In 1910 when a group of moderate Afrikaner parties came together to form a moderate Afrikaner nationalist party they called it the South Africa Party. This became the ruling party and then as the United Party the official opposition to the National Party, which invented apartheid. In Rhodesia in 1974 when a new moderate party was formed in opposition to the pro-apartheid Rhodesian Front party of Ian Smith, it called itself simply the Rhodesia Party. I suggest you call yourselves simply the Northern Ireland Party. This name will suggest that you are pro-union without all the negative connotations for nationalists of either the words unionist or Ulster. An alternate name is the Liberal Party or the Liberal Party of Northern Ireland. One of the predecessor parties to the Alliance Party was the Ulster Liberal Party, which relied on the corporate vote at Queen's University.

Second, I suggest you come to a de facto strategic agreement with the PUP and TUV to stay out of their areas if they will stay out of your core area. This is in order not to waste votes. Each of these other parties is competitive in only one or two constituencies. The Assembly with six seats in each constituency can support a maximum of six parties in any single constituency. The more realistic figure is five or even four. There are already five well-established parties and you will be competing for that last slot. Ideologically your logical competitors are the UUP, Alliance, and PUP. If you agree to stay out of East Belfast and North Belfast you should be able to neutralize the PUP so that you can concentrate on the UUP and Alliance. You must then decide on which districts to spend your limited resources in contesting. This should be based on your existing presence, the seats that the UUP is weakest in and Alliance has done well in. But you are in a better position to judge this for yourselves than I am.

Your third task is to come up with a party platform stressing your ideological positioning and innovative ideas. You might want to imitate Sinn Fein and steal boldly from Alliance or the PUP as the Shinners have stolen from the SDLP. But your positions should reflect your identity: pro-union and non-sectarian. I imagine it will be a mixture of the ideology of the PUP--without the paramilitary connection--and Alliance, something that will appeal to both working-class and middle-class unionists and pro-Union Catholics.

A new deal for Northern Ireland?

When the Good Friday Agreement aka Belfast Agreement was negotiated in April 1998 the emphasis was on getting the various paramilitary organizations to give up their weapons in exchange for a share of power in provincial and local government in Northern Ireland. Small parties, like the loyalist Ulster Democratic Party and the Progressive Unionist Party that represented the loyalist paramilitaries UDA and UVF respectively, were over-represented in the 1996 election that served to create the parties to the talks. The idea was to be as inclusive as possible. Now five years after the agreement was finally bedded down in 2007, many residents of Northern Ireland think that the agreement created an inefficient monster. The only real changes to the agreement were made in late 2006 at the resort of St. Andrews in eastern Scotland in order to allow the Democratic Unionist Party to claim it was signing up to a new agreement, but this was mere tinkering.

The Progressive Unionist Party has a new leader. Will it make any difference?

It was announced yesterday that Billy Hutchinson, a former member of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) arrested for a double murder in 1974 and a former member of the Assembly, will be the new leader of the sole remaining loyalist party, the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP). He takes over from Brian Ervine, the brother of David Ervine, who was the leader of the party during its glory days from 1998 to 2003 and who served in the Assembly with Hutchinson. Hutchinson will be the fourth party leader in 18 months. After David Ervine's death Dawn Purvis took over as party leader and managed to retain his East Belfast seat in the Assembly. But then the UVF carried out a murder of a former Red Hand Commando prisoner who had criticized the continued criminality of the organization. Purvis then resigned from the party when its leadership refused to break the link with the UVF. There was a temporary interim leader before Brian Ervine took over. Now Ervine is giving up the position because he cannot afford to give up his job.