NI POLITICS: Leaving the last chance saloon
There isn't room in the DUP for everyone
There is a positive future on offer for the UUP, but it depends on just one thing: a leader who’ll listen to his own party. For six gruelling years now the UUP leadership has sought a ‘middle way’ for Northern Ireland as a whole. Yet at the same time, it has disdained any comparable effort to find consensus and unity within its own ranks. As should be obvious to anyone, the UUP will not be able to build an ‘agreed Ulster’ unless it can find agreement amongst itself.
David Trimble, as party leader, has now to accept some basic responsibility for the place he has led the UUP to. To read, however, or listen to his own estimate of himself is to find no hope that he realises how the UUP has ended up where it presently is.
More than anything, it is the incoherence of David Trimble’s defence that betrays him. In the Belfast Telegraph yesterday, he knocked, for example, the ‘crypto-integrationists’ of his own party in one breath. Then, with his next, he jibes at Reg Empey, that what really matters is being ‘where the decisions are really made’ — Westminster. Well which is it then, the green benches of Parliament or the blue benches of Stormont?
Some defend the UUP leader’s performance by arguing, even though, like the previous three elections, the UUP emerged with fewer seats than when it went into the polls, the party’s percentage share of the Stormont vote fractionally rose. True enough, which only points up how wise it was to let Donaldson run this time under UU colours, and foolish it was to bar him in 1998.
Absurdly, to justify his own continued leadership, Mr Trimble warns against any ‘lurch to the right’. In so doing he seems to have forgotten that last year he was urging on the Tory leadership a scheme whereby the UUP would retake the Tory whip at Westminster, he would join the shadow cabinet, and Jeffrey Donaldson and Sylvia Hermon would become junior spokesmen. Presumably that lurch would have been okay?
Worst of all though is the humiliation David Trimble’s flailing is inflicting on the UUP. Perhaps you’ll remember his puce-faced threat to Tony Blair a month ago at Prime Minister’s questions: ‘unless you can summon up the courage to act on this matter within the next few days, I and my colleagues will take steps next Monday to bring that process to an end’? ‘That process’ you will note has hardly come to an end. And that’s because the leader of Ulster’s third party isn’t really in a position to credibly threaten anyone anymore.
In a nutshell, the tragedy with David Trimble is, even if he now means what he says, who thinks he’s going to stick to it? When you’ve cried wolf and turned turtle as many times as he has, people tend to lose confidence in you. Under his discredited leadership the UUP is not going to regain the trust of a majority of pro-Union voters.
What the UUP needs is a leader who will listen to his party not purge it. It has to be someone who’ll do as he promises and not use legalistic sophistry to subsequently justify wriggling out of those pledges. And whoever succeeds David Trimble, what that new leader must be is someone grass roots unionists have some faith in. Once upon a time David Trimble was that man; he stopped being so long ago and has led his party too long and too far towards destruction. Ulster Unionists who want to ensure that there is a UUP after David Trimble have to ensure he goes before he takes the party with him.
, March 23, 2004 02:20 PM