NI POLITICS: Do it for Ulster
Here’s your sword David, kindly fall on it
This year Northern Ireland at last took a step back, of sorts, to the past. David Trimble reshuffled his UUP ministers at Stormont, with Dermot Nesbitt moving up to become Environment Minister, and being replaced in turn by James Leslie. Mr Leslie is a welcome symbol of the ancien regime, with his sometime Rhodesian education, his boxing blue at Cambridge, his time in the army, and not least, the family seat, Leslie Hill. This latter is sufficiently pretty to make the front cover of Buildings of County Antrim, and it shows that, the ‘auld decency’ hasn’t gone away you know. What is in severe danger of going away - and it’s something that every voter in the Republic should fear - is the UUP’s status as largest party in the North. Simply put, if David Trimble leads his party into the May 2003 Stormont elections, it will be decimated and that will be the end of the Good Friday Agreement, and who wants that?
From a Unionist point of view, there’s a vast amount wrong with the Good Friday Agreement. There are the terribly big, terribly wrong things, such as freeing terrorists. Then there’s the stuff in the middle range of awfulness, like the kulturkampf against British symbols in the North (despite, in the South, as far as I’ve seen, the failure to, oh, rebuild Nelson's Pillar). Throw into the mix that Unionists confront this having met all the obligations they faced under the Agreement whilst Republicans have yet to do the one thing asked of them, and you can see why middle Ulster is unhappy. And, despite what you might think, the argument that they should be ‘grateful for peace’ never quite washes, as Unionists don't think they were responsible for there not being peace in the first place. Hence, they’re not overly keen on rewarding people for, more or less, giving up bad habits they never should have had in the first place.
However, it’s the small, as yet unnoticed things, that spell the most trouble for the new institutions. Take that reshuffle: Mr Trimble moved about members of his own party, for that’s all, under the provisions of the legislation that provides for the Executive, he can do. In a Dublin context, it means that the new cabinet would, as of right, consist of every party that got about 8% or 9% of the vote in the recent general election, and the only people who could move ministers about are the leaders of the parties those individuals belong to. This inherently undemocratic process has no long term viability, and we’d better face up to it. Yet Unionists, even the Paisleyites, show no sign of walking away from the political route. In part, that’s because constitutionalism is the fundamental ethos of Unionism, but chiefly it’s because they see the real gains being made for the province, even with, as they have it, these grievously deficient institutions.
At the moment, the DUP is certain to eclipse the Unionist party next May. The fundamental reason for this - however inadequate the Paisleyites’ critique of the settlement is - is that, in the person of the First Minister, Ulster Unionism has lost its political edge. While all other parties tear at the Agreement, attempt to make it more consistent with their goals, and duck and deal and weave around, David Trimble sits pat, akin more to a higher civil servant than a party politician.
It matters so much that both the SDLP and the UUP are losing electoral ground because their partnership is at the heart of the Agreement, and therefore central to stability in the North. They are the sole parties in office who want the current institutions to stick: Sinn Fein believes yet in the fantasy of an all-Ireland republic; and as for the DUP, well, God knows what they want – the myth of a congenial future British government presumably, as it’s what their entire ‘strategy’ depends upon.
To make the Agreement work, requires one thing, and lots of it - UUP assembly members. There are going to be far fewer of them after next May, unless the party is led into that campaign by someone other than Mr Trimble. Even were he to recover his political nous, and start tacking towards where all those lost Ulster Unionist voters are, the point is, his credibility is shot. To disenchanted Unionists, this little boy has cried ‘decommissioning’ once too often to convince. The tragedy of this is that, there may well be, and indeed are, positive things he can tell his electorate, but they no longer want to hear them from him. Someone, or something, else is needed, and soon, to get them back.
This is not to say that David Trimble should casually be lost to the Nobel Laureates’ lecture circuit. He is far too great a talent for that, or for an EU commissionership, or some mickey mouse job with the UN. Instead, the place for him is in the shadow cabinet. Greatly respected by members of the Tory party, he would be a weighty addition to their frontbench at Westminster, and able also thereby to advance the interests of Ulster. The lack of a decent, clear and intelligent voice at the UK political tier has been one of Unionism’s signal weaknesses for decades now.
Just about all his current, progressive supporters damned his election as party leader in 1995; whereas, in fact, David Trimble was the right, the brave, and the imaginative choice. Now, having followed his newly acquired friends’ advice too closely, he is in danger of wrecking the Agreement by destroying what it rests upon: the electoral viability of the UUP. For Ulster, and for peace, David Trimble should go (to SW1).
Kit Kildare is ERO’s political correspondent
Kit Kildare, September 3, 2002 10:56 AM