Will Ulster Unionists find a leader who can revive their dying party?
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Until the early 2000s, the Ulster Unionist Party dominated Northern Ireland politics. The UUP negotiated the Good Friday Agreement with the nationalist SDLP in 1998, but famously, or infamously, the two parties were usurped by hardline rivals in the aftermath of that deal. Now they lag significantly behind the DUP and Sinn Féin in every election.
Recently, the Ulster Unionist leader, Robin Swann, announced he intends to step down to spend more time with his family. He will be replaced on November 9 and his successor is expected to come from the party’s shrunken Stormont Assembly group, made up of ten MLAs.
The UUP has lately had some appalling results, most notably in this year’s European Parliamentary election, when it came sixth. It lost its two Westminster seats in Theresa May’s snap election of 2017 and it was beaten into fourth place in the Assembly election of the same year, winning two seats fewer than the SDLP.
It would be wrong, though, to write the UUP off as an irrelevance. It is regularly Northern Ireland’s third most popular party when it comes to first preference votes. In May, its worst ever local council result was still 14,000 votes ahead of the SDLP and 17,000 ahead of the Alliance Party, which sees itself as the surging force in Ulster politics.
Consistently, over 100,000 voters support the Ulster Unionists, even if the party sometimes seems unsure of who exactly it is appealing to. For a number of years, the UUP has struggled to explain how it differs from a modernised DUP, which is full of former Ulster Unionist members. It has tried and failed to find the ‘big idea’ that might inspire a revival.
In its glory days, when it formed Northern Ireland’s government, the party was a broad coalition that included practically every flavour of unionism. Back then, its breadth was a strength, but it gradually became a weakness, in the face of opposition from rival parties. In recent decades, Ulster Unionist leaders have never quite worked out whether to compete for hardline voters with the DUP or consolidate the party’s position as a more moderate option. Caught between these two strategies, they’ve lost support in both directions.
The UUP last generated energy and excitement when it formed an electoral pact with the Conservatives before the 2010 general election, under the leadership of Reg Empey. The ‘Conservatives and Unionists’, or UCUNF, enjoyed a successful European Parliamentary poll in 2009 but failed to win seats at Westminster, despite coming close in two constituencies. Their campaign was undermined by infighting, as some party members resisted the Tory link and the pact fell into disuse after Tom Elliott took over from Empey.
The party’s next leader, Mike Nesbitt, tried to forge a cross-community opposition with the SDLP, in order to emphasise the distance between the UUP and the DUP. The two parties were entitled to seats in the devolved Executive under Northern Ireland’s d’Hondt system, but, in 2016, a private member’s bill drafted by the independent unionist MLA, John McCallister, made it possible to form an official opposition at Stormont.
Unfortunately for Nesbitt, the EU referendum quickly followed his decision to work with the SDLP and politics became focused again on the province’s constitutional future, rather than devolved issues. When the UUP leader told voters they could ‘vote Mike and get Colum (Eastwood – the SDLP leader)’, many decided they didn’t like the prospect of voting unionist and getting a nationalist party that was advocating a border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. It didn’t help that Eastwood was much cooler in his overtures to Nesbitt and failed to replicate the UUP’s friendly language.
Then the Stormont Assembly collapsed in January 2017 and there was no longer even an executive for the short-lived opposition to oppose.
Just like his predecessors, Robin Swann has struggled to define how the Ulster Unionists fit in modern Northern Irish politics. He described his party as ‘radical moderates’ and claimed to espouse ‘new unionism’, but it wasn’t clear what these buzzwords actually meant. The UUP leader showed some liberalising tendencies by engaging positively with LGBT groups and he probably has a point when he says that these gestures weren’t sufficiently appreciated because he is an Orangeman, from the heartland of socially conservative unionism in North Antrim.
Now the party members have to decide who they believe can best replace Swann and give the UUP a renewed sense of purpose. The only declared candidate so far is South Antrim MLA, Steve Aiken; a former Royal Navy officer and staunch Remainer, whose Twitter timeline betrays sympathy with keen advocates of a border backstop.
The growing popularity of the Alliance Party highlights the need for a more socially liberal brand of unionism to avoid losing younger voters. If the UUP chooses to pursue these supporters, it must be careful not to compromise its message on the Union. Unionism can reflect the values of a changing society without accepting a dilution of Northern Ireland’s links with the rest of the UK.
