The Dream Lives On: The Conservatives in Northern Ireland

Since David Cameron became Conservative leader in 2005, he’s done a lot of backtracking. Yet one project he’s stuck with through thick and thin: breaking the Conservatives into Northern Irish politics. From employing full-time party staff to negotiating a fragile alliance with the Ulster Unionists, the party has put a lot of work into a project that has not yet returned a single MP, MLA or local councillor. Why do they persist, and do they have any hope of success?

It is a strange twist of British politics that despite being a predominantly English party, the Conservatives have always been the staunchest defenders of the Union between the four home nations of the UK. This is strange enough in Wales and Scotland, where the party enjoys or at least has enjoyed electoral success.

But Northern Ireland hasn’t returned any MPs with links to the mainland since 1970. So why do the Conservatives show such an interest in this often isolated, conflicted part of the United Kingdom?

The Tories and Ulster – A History

The unionist tradition in the Conservative party dates back to the end of the 19^th Century, when it was at the forefront of the opposition to Irish independence. In alliance with the anti-independence Liberal Unionists they were able to block Home Rule and delay independence for decades.

Once it became inevitable that most of Ireland would leave the Union, the Conservatives strongly supported the right of northern, largely Protestant unionists to stay within the UK, and played an important role in the creation of Northern Ireland.

Sir Edward Carson, MP for Trinity College Dublin, ran for leadership of the Conservatives and then went on to found the Ulster Unionist Party.

Tory leader Bonar Law even took the salute of armed loyalists threatening to rebel against any attempt to force Ulster into independence.

In modern times, the relationship between the Tories and Northern Ireland was defined by the Troubles. The Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972 happened under Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath. Until 1974 the Ulster Unionists took the Tory whip.

In many ways the Eighties continue to define the relationship between the Tories and Northern Ireland, from Bobby Sands and the Hunger Strikes to the infamous attempt by the IRA to assassinate then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1984.

Although she was lucky enough to survive, Lady Thatcher’s time in office was bookended by the murder of two of her favourite Conservative MPs, Airey Nieve and Ian Gow, who both had very strong Irish connections.

Breaking In – 1989-2005

Until 1974, the Conservatives were represented in Northern Ireland by the UUP. After they rejected the Tory whip no mainland parties were represented in the province. This began to change under John Major.

Not everybody in Northern Ireland liked this isolation, and the Campaign for Equal Citizenship (CEC) was founded. This campaigned argued for a policy of integration – a permanent end to devolution and for mainland parties to contest Northern Irish elections.

Noted political writer and unionist politician David Vance used to be Deputy Leader of the United Kingdom Unionist Party (UKUP). He said: “The point of CEC was to broaden the political choice available to the Northern Ireland electorate by encouraging all the major UK parties to organise and stand for election in Northern Ireland.

“By engaging the electorate on broader UK wide issues there was a chance to move politics beyond the parochial and onto the national stage.”

It was this campaign that led to the re-creation of the Northern Irish Conservatives in 1989 after sustained lobbying from pro-Conservative CEC members, led by Dr Laurence Kennedy, in the affluent constituency of North Down.

In the build-up to the 1992 general election opposition to devolution in Scotland and Wales was at the front of John Major’s campaign, so the concept of anti-devolutionary ‘equal citizenship’ found plenty of support from the rank and file.

The North Down Conservative Association enjoyed some successes. In 1989 six local councillors were elected to North Down Borough Council. In the 1992 election Dr Kennedy came second in the North Down constituency with 32% of the vote and over 14,000 votes – the closest a Conservative had come to holding the seat since 1885. The party took a total of 44,608 votes across the province.

However, after 1992 the collapse of the Conservatives across the country hit Northern Ireland too. In the 1995 by-election in North Down the Conservatives suffered their worst by-election result since 1918 and their vote collapsed to just 2.1%.

Northern Ireland Conservative Chairman Irwin Armstrong attributed this both to the Tories’ ongoing collapse on the mainland and the development of the peace process.

He said: “There was a certain amount of disruption within the national party in the run up to the 1997 general election and there were the negotiations which eventually led to the Good Friday agreement, where local parties were central to the deal.”

He continued: “During those years the local party virtually collapsed and subsequently it stood only a few candidates when elections were called and there was very little serious campaigning. The Conservative Party nationally then underwent a long process of soul-searching and reinvention during the years of Opposition.

“Naturally the party’s energies were devoted to GB and recovering as a serious electoral force, rather than pushing its presence in Northern Ireland.”

For the next ten years, the Northern Irish Conservatives were almost entirely unsupported as the Tories tried to rebuild themselves as a force in British politics. By 2001, their general election vote was only 2422 across all 18 constituencies and they were no longer contesting many local and European elections at all.

Vote share of the Conservatives in various Northern Irish elections from 1989 to 2011. Statistics courtesy of the University of Ulster.

UCUNF – Cameron Tries Again

After David Cameron was elected Conservative leader in 2005, his own deeply held unionist convictions led the party to try once again to break into Northern Ireland. For the first time the party opened a permanent staffed office after hiring Owen Polley, author of the widely-respected pro-union blog 3000 Versts of Loneliness.

However, the approach taken was very different from the go-it-alone approach of Dr Kennedy and the CEC Conservatives of the Nineties. Instead, Cameron negotiated an alliance with the waning Ulster Unionists, hoping to trade on their brand awareness and established base.

This was a highly controversial move that caused a lot of problems, especially amongst those who had earlier supported the Conservatives in the province. Writing in 2009 Dr Kennedy declared that the Conservative movement he had led was being ‘stitched up’.

He continued: “The Ulster Unionists will just take the Tory whip, not be required to run as Conservatives – the same old client relationship that will again ensure that a “Conservative” vote will be just as sectarian as an Ulster Unionist one.”

This concern was shared by Ian Parsley, the 2010 Conservative candidate in North Down who had defected from the cross-community Alliance party.

“The agreement of a ‘Unionist Unity’ candidate in Fermanagh/South Tyrone gave the lie to the notion that UCUNF was some kind of ‘centre-right Alliance Party’, which is what I’d signed up to,” he said.

He continued: “The failure to shift the agenda away from the DUP’s obsession with ‘Unionist Unity’ and ‘balance of power’, and towards non-sectarian politics and playing a role on welfare reform, fiscal policy, European issues and so on, led to the DUP controlling the campaign.”

Sectarianism was to prove a major pitfall during the campaign. In January the party was caught holding secret talks with the DUP at Hatfield House. These talks appeared to bear fruit when the Conservatives, Ulster Unionists and Democratic Unionists all decided to support one Unionist candidate in the ultra-marginal Sinn Féin seat of Fermanagh and South Tyrone.

Although this independent would take the Tory whip, this was almost a step too far for many Conservatives. Even provincial Chairman Irwin Armstrong was pushed to the brink of resignation.

He said: “Then the abandonment of a pledge to fight all constituencies, including Fermanagh South Tyrone, did the project enormous damage.

“That was a key moment, which undermined everything the pact was supposed to stand for. It’s not widely known, but it was only the national party interest which persuaded me not to withdraw my nomination as the candidate in North Antrim.”

He continued: “I felt that the Conservative Party and its members had been betrayed and were forced to compromise their important cross community credentials. The promise to give every single voter in the UK a chance to vote for a Conservative candidate had been abandoned.”

Aftermath of the 2010 Election

In the end, UCUNF delivered no MPs in the 2010 general election. This led to the resignation of UUP leader Sir Reg Empey, who had been a key supporter of the partnership. Despite his assurances that the new leadership believed in the alliance, new leader Tom Elliott led the UUP into the 2011 Assembly elections without the Conservatives.

Everybody has their own list of reasons for this disappointing result. These can be divided into two types: problems with the campaign, and problems with the concept.

There appears to be a broad consensus about where the campaign went wrong. Apart from the problem with sectarianism listed above, a major complaint was the last minute nature in which it was organised.

Ian Parsley claimed that ‘the catastrophic failure to select candidates until barely a month before the election itself’ created all kinds of further difficulties.

For example, the DUP had time to recover from the scandals that rocked Peter and Iris Robinson at the beginning of the year because there were no UCUNF candidates ready to exploit the issue. The electorate also had ‘six months of literature pushed through their doors in six weeks’.

This same difficulty was picked up on by Trevor Ringland, former international rugby player and the Ulster Unionist candidate for East Belfast.

He said: “UCUNF was the right idea but it had a lot of problems. We only had a six week lead-in in each constituency before polling day and it just wasn’t enough.”

David Vance concurs, adding: “Another factor behind the failure of UCUNF is that it seemed to appear from nowhere, was not sold effectively as a major initiative and seemed to reduce to a few contrived photo calls with little evidence of widespread UUP support.”

This rushed campaign also undermined what should have been one of UCUNF’s key assets – new, fresh candidates. Ian Parsley said:

“To look new and vibrant, the project needs new and vibrant candidates – but they needed to be selected in time for the electorate to get to know them. Big opportunities to get known, such as Christmas activities and so on, were thus missed.”

The final major reasons for the failure of the campaign were divisions both between the Conservatives and the UUP and within the UUP itself.

According to Cllr Parsley: “The UUP was unable to move beyond its dislike of the DUP and thus campaigned primarily on parochial issues, which was to the DUP’s obvious advantage.”

These divisions became clearer after the election when Sir Reg Empey became a Conservative peer and Tom Elliott, the new leader, dissolved the alliance.

The supposed point of the Conservative project – introducing normalised, non-sectarian politics to Northern Ireland – was thus undermined by attaching it to a pre-existing local party steeped in sectarian issues. It had certainly come a long way from the initial ambitions of Dr Kennedy and the CEC.

David Vance, who as Deputy Leader saw the pro-integration UKUP win the North Down constituency and a clutch of assembly seats in the late Nineties, agreed that the modern Conservatives in Northern Ireland only offer equal citizenship ‘in principle, but not in reality’.

Going Backwards?

All this begs the question: where do the Northern Irish Conservatives go from here? Despite a cosmetically high vote share for UCUNF in 2010, the Tories themselves have not come close to matching their early Nineties success.

In the 2010 election, Ian Parsley in North Down took only 6,800 votes – nothing close to Dr Kennedy’s 14,000. In Northern Ireland’s 18 constituencies UCUNF fielded only two Conservatives – Parsley in North Down and Armstrong in the rock-solid DUP seat of North Antrim. In the Nineties the Conservatives also elected six local councillors in North Down, but do not even have one today.

There are those that argue that performance in North Down – traditionally regarded as the most ‘mainland’ of the Northern Irish constituencies and the Tories best hope for a breakthrough – can’t be taken as evidence of the party’s broader prospects.

Matthew Robinson, Chairman of the Northern Ireland Conservative Future youth movement, thinks that the 1992 result has distracted the party. He said: “I think North Down was a fluke, to be honest. North Down is a very special case. Bob McCartney came in during the late 90s as the UKUP MP and blew out a lot of Tory support.”

David Vance agrees that personality politics plays a large role in the seat. According to him: “A dominant and colourful personality tends trump party loyalties. James Kilfedder had a large personal vote in 1992 and it was most likely this that stopped the Tories winning.”

But he believes that the seat is not the naturally Conservative seat some presume it is.

He explained: “There also seems to be an anti-Conservative dimension to North Down, exemplified in Lady Hermon’s antipathy towards the Conservative Party and her serial voting with Labour.

“Champagne socialism is vintage in this area and despite the ABC1 demographic I do not believe that North Down is fertile ground for the Tories at this time.”

In terms of electoral success, the Conservatives appear to have gone backwards since the Nineties. But in allying with the UUP to reverse this decline have they also gone backwards in what they offer the electorate?

Dr Kennedy described the UUP/Conservative alliance as ‘quite a cycnical, backward step’. He sees his project to bring Northern Ireland into normal mainland politics apparently reduced to an attempt to bring the Ulster Unionists back under the Tory whip, which they withdrew from in 1974.

He finishes: “Please explain to me how Catholic conservatives in NI will be attracted by a cobbled up arrangement with the UUP.”

However, Ian Parsley believes that an alliance with a local party is the only way for the Conservatives to make an impact in Northern Irish politics. He explained:

“NI has had a stable five-party system effectively since the Hunger Strikes, and although there is the occasional breakthrough by others – such as the Conservatives in the early ’90s, local Labour in the late ’90s, the TUV and the Greens now – those breakthroughs have never proved to last more than a full electoral cycle.”

Moving Forward

Not everybody is so pessimistic. Irwin Armstrong believes that the Conservatives have a positive role to play in the future of the province’s politics.

Percentage results of the 2011 NILT survey.

He said: “Our own internal research indicates that many voters believe in mainland politics, that they’re unhappy with the performance of the assembly and that they’re looking for an alternative.   The NILT survey and the fall in turnouts are also evidence of this.”

He refers to the Northern Ireland Life and Times survey, which is taken every year. Since 2008 it has showed a majority of Catholics favour remaining within the United Kingdom – a truly monumental development in a province where ‘Catholic’ and ‘nationalist’ have been used interchangeably for generations.

The partnership also appears to benefit the UUP, despite the position of their current leader.

Mr Armstrong also stresses that the Conservatives remain hopeful that the alliance with the UUP can be revived. When asked about the party’s plans going forward, he writes:

“Our joint Chairman, with support of the Prime Minister, the Party Board and I, has made a broad and generous offer to the UUP. The offer is to set up a new party under the auspices of the Conservative Party, if the UUP and local Conservatives disband. We still await a final response from the UUP by Christmas and we will announce our plans for the future in the New Year once that has been received.”

This might come to something, despite the reluctance of the new UUP leadership. Several former members of the UUP have publicly supported Lord Feldman’s push for a merger.

As Ian Parsley points out: “For all the problems, I would note that 102,000 people voted UCUNF in the 17 constituencies in which there were candidates, while the UUP received just 78,000 first-preference votes in the same 17 constituencies a year later.

“It is my view that maintaining the relationship and correcting some of the above issues would have been beneficial to both parties.”

Conclusion

The Conservative and Unionist Party has a long and chequered history with Ireland. Yet despite the near-death of one of their strongest leaders, the assassination of two popular MPs and the killing and maiming of other party members in acts of republican terrorism, the Tory commitment to the Union remains undiminished.

This commitment is reflected in the tenacity of their attempts to get into Northern Ireland. Despite the potential for scandal and the lack of electoral success, the local Conservatives remain doggedly loyal and under David Cameron the national party leadership is backing them up.

The reasons for this commitment are rooted in the history of the party as much as any up-to-date political calculations. It is hard to tell whether or not this latest move by the Conservatives to woo the UUP will be any more successful than the last. With the DUP – formerly the bastion of ultra-Protestantism – planning to appeal to Catholic voters, the anti-sectarian pro-Union niche the party plans to occupy may disappear.

One thing seems certain, however. Whether this latest plan works or not, the Northern Irish Conservatives aren’t giving up.