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Watershed election looms for Unionists

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Jack Holland

Even though the lists of candidates for the upcoming British general election are not yet complete, the campaign for the June 7 showdown has already well begun.

Indeed, David Trimble, the embattled leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, might well be said to have fired the starting pistol four days before the date of the election was even announced when he declared that he would resign from the position of first minister of the power-sharing executive on July 1 unless the IRA had commenced arns decommissioning. However, like many of the shots that will be fired over the coming weeks, it is not always easy to determine who is the primary target.

Trimble was actually firing a shot across the bows if the Democratic Unionist Party and the anti-agreement faction within his own party as much as he was taking aim at Sinn Fein and the republican movement. The UUP is worried about the surge from the right, with the DUP fielding 14 candidates. For the first time in a contest for the 18 Westminster seats, the party of moderate Unionism will face a challenge from the DUP in nearly every constituency.

On the face of it, the prognosis for the Trimble’s party is not good. In the 1998 assembly elections, when the UUP and DUP faced off in every constituency in Northern Ireland for the first time, the result was that the UUP came away with 22 percent of the vote. For the first time, it was overtaken by the Social Democratic and Labor Party, which replaced it as the party with the biggest share of the vote. If that performance is repeated on June 7, then the UUP, with only about one-fifth of the vote, could not hope to hold all of its nine Westminster seats. That is, regardless of the impact of the battle between pro-and-anti-agreement factions, the very fact of a concerted DUP challenge at the polls will be certain to damage the UUP’s prospects.

The Rev. Ian Paisley’s party can hope to win three seats from the UUP — North Belfast, where Nigel Dodds is the DUP candidate going against Cecil Walker, East Derry, where Gregory Campbell is opposing UUP’s William Ross, and Strangford, the seat vacated by UUP veteran John Taylor which Iris Robinson (DUP Deputy leader Peter Robinson’s wife) is hoping to seize.

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The DUP is more ambitious than this. It claims it can take five seats altogether. Including the three already mentioned, the party is saying it will win East Antrim, currently held by Roy Beggs, and Trimble’s seat of Upper Bann. According to Peter Robinson, the UUP will "be cleared out."

The "old brigade," Robinson said, "will go as they did in the 1970s" when Unionist anger mounted against the Sunningdale Agreement, which set up the North’s first attempt at a power-sharing government with a cross-border council in January 1974. The experiment lasted only until May that year, before being brought down by loyalist action on the streets.

It has become something of a cliché that Trimble is now confronting the kind of 1974 meltdown that destroyed moderate Unionism for almost a generation. However, such a scenario is most unlikely because of the fact that the DUP has accepted a large part of the agreement against which its candidate’s are running. It is campaigning on the premise that it could renegotiate the parts of the agreement its leaders don’t like, including the plans to replace "the gallant RUC," as Dodds termed it.

They would dilute the cross-border bodies, making them "voluntary" rather than mandated. However, even if they did achieve their goals, reducing the UUP representation at Westminster to four, there is no likelihood that the British or Irish governments would have any stomach for such renegotiations. Even if they had, Northern nationalists would never accept such a dilution of the agreement.

Impractical as the DUP’s platform is, it could well be strong enough to secure three seats. Would this devastate Trimble and force his resignation? Probably not. The vagaries of the upcoming contest are such that the UUP has a reasonable chance of winning two other seats — North Down, currently occupied by Robert McCartney of the Northern Ireland Unionist Party, and South Antrim, which the DUP’s folk singing preacher, Willie McCrea, took from the UUP in September last year.

The wealthy constituency of North Down would seem like natural pro-agreement territory and the UUP’s Sylvia Hermon (wife of former Chief Constable Jack Hermon) should therefore be able to mount a decisive challenge, which would be more effective if the moderate Alliance Party candidate agreed to drop out.

The DUP won South Antrim after a historically low voter turnout. But again, it is not natural anti-agreement territory, and a high turnout could reverse the odds and give David Burnside (who ran in September) a chance of winning back the seat for the UUP.

The problem for the DUP this time around is that to remove Trimble it will have to do more than win the match on points. It will have to score a knockout. If Trimble walks back to his corner at the end of the fight, bloodied after loosing two or three seats, he will still, in effect, have won.

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