Last Thursday, millions of voters in England went to the polls in the first electoral test since Labour’s Westminster landslide victory last year.
With over 1,600 council seats as well as four regional and two local mayors decided and a new MP for the English Commons constituency of Runcorn and Helsby, the Right-wing Reform UK bandwagon is on a roll.
If Thursday’s results were replicated in the next Westminster General Election - expected in 2029 - Nigel Farage could well be handed the keys of 10 Downing Street.
The key question which the pro-Union community in Northern Ireland must now address is, could Reform UK guarantee the Union where the Tories in the past have politically stabbed Unionism in the back?
Okay, so the Right-wing Traditional Unionist Voice party fronted by North Antrim MP Jim Allister had some kind of political ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ with Reform UK in the days before Nigel Farage took charge of the latter.
Likewise, given the current existence of the Irish Sea Border, the Protocol and the Windsor Framework, could any Unionist party in Northern Ireland ever trust another Tory Party again?
Has the pro-Union community not learned from history about climbing into bed politically with the Tories. Was it not Tory PM Ted Heath who prorogued the original Unionist-dominated Stormont Parliament in 1972?
Was it not the so-called Iron Lady of Right-wing Conservatism, Maggie Thatcher, who as Prime Minister in 1985 signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement with Southern Ireland giving Dublin its first major say in the running of Northern Ireland since partition in the 1920s?
What about Tory PM John Major’s Downing Street Declaration which laid the foundation stones for the disbanding of the then RUC and its replacement with the now cash-strapped PSNI?
Another former PM, Boris Johnson, was lauded by the DUP as a political hero. That did not end well for Unionism over Brexit. Then there was the ‘confidence and supply’ arrangement between the DUP and the Tories at Westminster to keep the Conservatives in power. Yet another political disaster!
Put bluntly, as for Unionism’s political relationships with Tory PMs Theresa May, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, the phrase ‘Unionism’s demise’ comes startlingly to mind!
Unionism is already fragmented politically and Commons seats, such as the once rock solid Unionist Lagan Valley, were lost to the pan nationalist front because there were too many Unionist parties in the frame.
What happens, if on the back of the ‘Farage Factor’, leader Nigel decides to abandon his party’s so-called ‘Memorandum’ with the TUV and begins to organise in Northern Ireland in the same way the Tories did in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Whilst numerous Conservative associations across Northern Ireland were formally recognised by Tory HQ, it did not result in a single Conservative MP being returned from the Province. The closest the Tories came was within a few thousand votes of unseating the late Sir James Kilfedder in North Down who was then leader of the fringe Ulster Popular Unionist Party.
But apart from a few councillors dotted across Northern Ireland, the electoral impact of the Tories has been next to nil, so what would make Reform UK think it can do any better than the Tories?
Instead, Reform UK should brand itself as a Right-wing pressure group in Northern Ireland, operating in the same way as the Ulster Vanguard movement in the 1970s before it made the mistake of launching itself as a separate political party.
Like it or not, there will need to be a realignment within the pro-Union community and a clear working relationship will have to be established between the three main Unionist parties - the DUP, UUP and TUV - otherwise more Assembly seats could be lost to the pan nationalist front come the next Stormont poll expected in 2027.
There has been much talk of voter apathy among the pro-Union community and it could become a generational factor with sons and daughters opting to follow their parents’ examples by ignoring the ballot box on polling days.
It has even been suggested by some Unionist activists that up to 48 per cent of the pro-Union community is not coming out to vote. Could Reform UK, operating as a pressure group, convince large sections of the pro-Union community to re-engage with the electoral process?
What is certainly not needed by the pro-Union community is for Reform UK to use the ‘Farage Factor’ to launch itself as a separate political party in Northern Ireland, further fragmenting the Unionist vote.
Without doubt, Farage has shown that he is a vote winner. He proved it with the United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip) and the Brexit Party in past European elections.
In the last Westminster General Election, albeit with a handful of MPs, he did make the Reform UK’s Commons breakthrough. Farage is a close ally of US President Donald Trump, so could we see a political back channel of warming of UK-US relations similar to the Thatcher-Ronald Reagan relationship of the 1980s?
Farage has visited Northern Ireland on a few occasions during his Ukip days and he certainly created a massive political buzz on each trip.
The key question which Right-wing pro-Union political activists must address following last Thursday’s results in England is - could Farage be the man to knock Unionist heads together in Northern Ireland finally convincing them they need to form a genuine working relationship against the pan nationalist front?
Irish politics has often been dubbed the art of the impossible. Could we even see Farage addressing demonstrations of the Loyal Orders in the future? Stranger things have happened in the weird world of Ulster politics!
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| Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. |
John, Reform are thick as pig shit English nationalists who do not give a damn for Unionists or Nationalists or Scotland. All they want is a back to the future Little England imagined community. You have been warned;
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