While a Conservative UK Government is to be welcome, the proposed Tory-UUP tie-up is crazy

The Conservatives are being advised by David “Lundy” Trimble, who sold out the people of Ulster with the Belfast Agreement, and then failed to deliver, and watched while terrorist prisoners were released, arms were not decommissioned, and the police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, was dismantled. 

Common sense Ulster people ejected Trimble even from his prosperous Upper Bann constituency, in which I have had the pleasure of living for the past 6 months.  The UUP went down from having a majority of unionist seats to only one in 2005.  They had the first minister in the Assembly and then lost it.  They are a spent electoral force. 

Trimble is advising the Tories to amalgamate with the UUP and contest every seat in Northern Ireland.  As Jeffrey Donaldson, DUP MP for Lagan Valley, (once a rock solid UUP seat) rightly pointed out, what about the proposed Unionist pact to stop Sinn Fein winning Fermanagh & South Tyrone and the SDLP from winning South Belfast? 

And what’s more, Tory MEP Dan Hannan described Northern Ireland as an “over-subsidised quango state.”  What gives him the right to say this? 

Most of all, sensible Ulster people will simply not vote in sufficient numbers for the Conservatives, who were responsible for the iniqitous Anglo-Irish Agreement – not to mention wiping out much of Ulster’s industrial base during the Thatcherite period of the 1980s.

The UUP/Tory pact is a non-starter.  It is the advice of a failed politician (Trimble) to the next Prime Minister (Cameron) and is bad judgment all around that it is even being considered.  The UUP’s sole MP Sylvia Hermon is rightly against the idea, it is rumoured. 

It would be like toxic debt being injected into the markets – but in this case, a toxic political force (the UUP) being injected into the veins of the Conservative Party – and should be abandoned forthwith.  And, anyway, just as Scottish Unionists didn’t like being bossed about from London, Ulster people simply wouldn’t wish to be bossed about by the Conservative Party in London either…

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