Cameron and short-termism

Before the disaster of 1997 and the subsequent humiliations of Hague and IDS, it was said even grudgingly by Conservative Party detractors that the one thing that organisation was good at doing was winning elections. The 2010 experience proved they have not regained their former expertise (although it is worth remembering that, had the unions not decided to destroy the Callaghan administraton and, ultimately, their own power, in the winter 1978/79, Thatcher might have struggled to beat a tired and discredited Labour administration with an unelected leader [although at least Sunny Jim had the grace to win an internal struggle]). Indeed, the ongoing student whining must serve as a constant reminder both to Tory high command and their disaffected back benchers of the inconvenient partner in the government bed.

Thus it is perhaps not surprising that thoughts are already turning to the next election and how to restore the Conservative reputation as an efficient electoral machine, a reputation last earned in 1992, at least at national level. If Cameron gets his way, and personally I hope he does not, that will be 2015 under his hugely misguided fixed-term parliaments wheeze. More likely it will be swifter than that as the ongoing political flux brings down that idea, along with AV (good) and fairer constituency sizes (bad, but it appears you can't win 'em all), as well as eventually breaking up with Nick and Dave show.

Predicting when the next election is, even before one gets into who might win it, is a pretty difficult business, and, if my increasingly infrequent trips to hand cash to the bookies are anything to go by, my punditry is not something on which to be relied. However, all three parties have problems: the Tories are the public face of the cuts, the Lib Dems have a trust issue and Labour have Ed, pointlessly sniping from the sidelines about a problem he helped create and which he appears to have zero constructive ideas on how to solve. Neither of the main parties looks like a natural winner at this stage and we don't know how long until blue and red will try once again to claim a victory that doesn't have a yellow hue that proves that all that glisters is not gold.

Any advantage might be crucial and that, I assume, has driven Conservative Central Office to perform a u-turn on pledges made to their NI chairman, Irwin Armstrong, and back down on a commitment to stand candidates in next year's elections to the NI Assembly. The prize appears to be a deal by which UUP MPs would take the Conservative whip at Westminster, potentially giving the Tories a push towards overall majority if once again no party is able to do a convincing least-worst job in the campaign.

But what are chances of the UUP, current seats nil, actually being able to make a meaningful contribution should the Tories fall agonisingly short once again? At first glance, as the party lurches from one defection crisis to another as it "shakes out" much of its liberal wing, it appears that Elliott has sold Cameron a pup. However, despite the desire many of us, myself included, who had hoped for progress towards a normalisation of NI politics and whose hopes have been dealt a hammer blow by this announcement, might hrbour that the UUP will continue to wither and die, I suspect their general election prospects next time round could well actually be better than in the recent past, provided Tom continues to steer his steady course and they avoid any wipeout in the intervening NI-specific polls between now and the next Westminster contest.

For example, and even after my previous comments about my tipping record I'd be prepared to stake hard cash on this, Mike Nesbitt will win in Strangford next time round. Nesbitt has backed the right horse (torturous extened gambling analogy only partially intentional) internally and, as befits an experienced media operator, has made all the right noises in his fledgling political career thus far. In contrast, Jim Shannon MP has been, from the Ulster-Scots in his maiden speech forward, just as woeful as predicted. Crucially, Nesbitt has the high profile that is so advantegeous, particularly in NI where personality every time trumps policy, and, let's face it, there's hardly likely to be much policy difference between an Elliott-led UUP and an increasingly centrist and secularist DUP anyway. So we can fairly confidently chalk up one MP to help out the Tories should they require it. And, if that just happened to be all that was required, I'm sure Central Office would consider the deal a job well done, particularly given that the individual would be just the "right sort" envisaged by the New Force link-up in the first place, a man who'd be right at home with a ministerial, maybe even ultimately a Cabinet, role.

However, it might not only be one. Sir Reg Emp(t)ey, a nice enough guy but one of the worst long-term politicians at actually getting elected for anything there perhaps has ever been, almost won South Antrim from the odious Willie McCrea, despite being parachuted in at the last moment after yet another of the debilitating internal disputes that characterised the UCUNF debacle. The time between May 2010 and the next election will see the NI demographic continue to shift inexorably away from the dinosaurs like the boul' Reverend, which should make him even more vulnerable to either defeat or deselection. The key task for the UUP is to identify a credible opponent either for McCrea or his replacement and start marketing him or her clearly and as early as possible. As long as the UUP can hit upon the right individual they could and should win a second seat.

As a certain NI comedian might say, "There's more..." Freed from the constraint of claiming to offer non-sectarian politics to all, the UUP should be able to do a deal with the DUP over FST and South Belfast, whereby Tom himself could look to harness the unionist community in his heartland and claim a third seat. It will not be easy, as the SDLP are unlikely to be able to put up a candidate as impressive as last time out for an impossible task, so the stay-at-home (or TUV scrawling...) Unionists will have to be roused in far greater numbers to best a rising SF vote in a straight 'ussuns-and-themmuns struggle. Nonetheless, a third seat is possible.

Fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh seats, surely not? I'd grant you, we may be moving into the territory of the highly unlikely, but there are four other seats were the scenario of a UUP victor could be constructed. In North Down, the awful Sylvia has made her point and, given her attendance record, clearly doesn't really like being an MP. A "Labour" peerage for this most unlikely of socialists would almost certainly be enough to open up the field in North Down, where the DUP has never won. Again, candidate choice and promotion is key, but there's unlikely to be an option worse than Ian Parsley and North Down (along with South Antrim) could be a breeding ground for the rebooted Conservative election machine to experiment with their financial and marketing clout to create the new breed of UUP-as the-Conservative-brand generation.

Upper Bann was in the news recently for all the wrong reasons as the UUP lost one of their better performers in the May 2010 fiasco in "Flash" Harry Hamilton. A messy business and one I'm sure was motivated at least as much by personalities as future party direction. However, the most interesting aspect, for me, was the main beneficiary of Hamilton's demise, Colin McCusker. The McCusker name is an attractive one for the Elliott UUP, and readers can read a homily to the late Harold on Mike Nesbitt's website, for example. I won't claim to be an expert on him, as he died before I'd left primary school. However, in the new UUP narrative, I see him cast as the lost leder, the successor to Molyneaux that never was and whose untimely demise, conveniently for the story, opened the door to Trimble and all the pain that caused to the UUP. So, if not the lost leader, why not his son, as the prefect antidote to the Trimble-ism that brought the Upper Bann UUP to its current sorry state? My inkling is that Colin is being groomed as the challenger to David Simpson and, given the anonymity of said opponent, I can see a good campaign returning a McCusker once again in this constituency.

The other possibles move even further into the longshot territory, and both are worth a mention solely due to the glaring weakness of the two incumbents, namely East Belfast's Naomi Long and North Antrim's Ian Paisley Junior. A UUP candidate in either would have to come from a long way back, but the former constituency will presumably also have a new DUP challenger starting from a lower base than the estate agent, while the good burghers of the East will have had at least a few years to realise that while Naomi might be talented at certain things (although droning on and eating are hardly two prerequisites of a superb public representative), being an effective MP ain't one of them. Equally, North Antrim's voters might have cottoned on to the fact that just being someone's son does not outweigh being a prat, although I wouldn't put money on that one. However, if Allister could stomach sticking around for a bit longer and there is a strong message that, while the TUV is a good home for a traditionalist's protest vote, only a UUP candidate could actually win, then again, with the right candidate (say Tory-to-UUP defector Duncan Crossey?) and a focused campaign, North Antrim could become a possibililty.

So, one highly likely gain and maybe up to six more if everything fall right for a Tory-backed UUP is the prize that Cameron's deal could deliver him and his party the next time we nationally go the polls. Whichever the number, if it just happens to be enough to drag the Tories over the finishing line, he and his advisors will no doubt consider it a gamble that was well worth taking.

Personally, I think it represents a dreadful decision, even if it so happens to allow the Conservatives an overall majority next time round, a prospect I would normally (and probably deep down, no matter the sense of betrayal I feel today, would still) welcome.

It's bad for the party. The easy jibe from all Conservative opponents, be they Labour, Lib Dem (when allowed), SNP, PC, any of the NI parties including the UUP when it suits them, the left-leaning media or bar room socialists on any comment feed on the web, is that they are an English party. With this injunction on putting up candidates in NI and UUP "franchise", allied to an increasing enthusiam for semi-detaching Scotland, they play into these opponents' hands, even when the experience in Wales, for example, provides evidence against. The local Conservatives might well have failed to gain an NI Assembly seat - with the delay in committing to a campaign, anger over cuts that have to be made but are unlikely to be welcomed and the DUP's "SF as FM" bogeyman trump card, it wasn't going to be easy. But a commitment to stand and to expend resources would have strengthened the Conservatives as a, and indeed the only, national party fully engaged in all parts of the UK. Now they cannot make such a defence and both the party and, ultimately, the union itself is weaker for that.

It's bad for unionism. This might seem a bit of a non-sequitur as the UUP, the slightly less toxic brand of Unionism (note the big U) celebrates a deal that removes a potential opponent and shores up, to some extent, both its coffers and its weakness towards haemmoraging more voters on a centre ground becoming crowded by Alliance's growing confidence and the DUP's centrist drift. However, there remains the obvious issue that unionists from without the Unionist community will not vote for a party with the UUP's baggage and Tom's orange sash in any great numbers. Whether they'd vote for the Conservatives, at the present time, in any great numbers either is a moot point. Should the Tories have made any inroads into their natural constituency, middle-class people from the Unionist community turned off by Unionism, and started having some electoral success, it would have increased the momentum towards Labour and the Lib Dems fully committing to NI and acted as the catalyst towards the shift to normal politics that will be the only thing which saves NI over the long haul. As such, Cameron has sacrificed a position that had long-term benefit for not only the Unionist community but also NI society as a whole, for the sake of a few potential seats that he nmight or might not need in a forthcoming election.

It's bad for the NI political process as it currently stands. When the Tories announced their original deal with the UUP, there was much bleating from SF and even the SDLP that this arrangement was not in keeping with the "spirit" of the GFA, that the British government had to be a honest broker who wouldn't take sides, while ignoring, of course in typical SF style, the Irish government's role as a highly partisan broker through 30-odd years of peace negotiations. It could relatively easily be dismissed as bluffing by parties made fairly umcomfortable by the prospect of the old certainties that guaranteed them votes through the same tired old sectarian rhetoric coming to an end. There was nothing wrong with a mainland party targeting NI representation with an avowedly unionist bent, indeed logically a pan-UK party could have no other, just as any of the souttern parties setting up in the North would necessarily have a nationalist hue. However, what the Conservatives, crucially, were promising was non-sectarian unionism, not Unionism - the sort of unionism that underpins the current status of NI due to the fact that a significant minority of the Nationalist community are unionist on the border question for sound practical reasons. The UUP could be semi-detached allies, at least until they offered genuine reform, but only under a unionist, not a Unionist banner.

However, to return to my point on any FST-SB pact, the UUP are now, at least apparently, freed of the constraint of having to offer non-sectarian politics to all. There do not seem to be any obligations on them to abandon their Unionism, but instead have secured Conservative backing with no strings attached, no demand to reform. This shifts the ground in terms of central government dealings with NI parties. No longer can the Conservatives look at Unionism and Natonalism in the face and say, "We disagree with both of you, we are small-u unionists but not big-U Unionists," because that will not be true. I believe this is a dangerous path to have taken.

My sympathies go out to good people like Irwin Armstrong and the party workers on the floor. And my contempt goes out to Cameron and his cronies, who put potential short-term gain over the long-term prospects for both Conservative unionism and NI's future. Shame on them.