Steve Aiken doesn’t become leader of the UUP for another 13 days, but he seems to be going in all guns blazing.
This is what he said on Friday, a few hours before the DUP’s conference: “At Westminster, the DUP is synonymous with the antics of Ian Paisley and his luxury holidays, and Sammy Wilson and his denial of climate change. This will be the most important general election since World War II. It is time to get unionism back on track and to send sensible, competent representatives to Parliament who are capable of defending the Union. The DUP has made Northern Ireland a place apart in the UK and that is very dangerous indeed. Mrs Foster has led unionists into a disastrous position constitutionally. That will be her political epitaph.”
And just in case some critics suggest they’ve heard all this rhetoric before from UUP leaders, only to find it’s followed by some sort of ‘electoral arrangement’, he added: “The UUP will be contesting every seat in the general election. We will be aiming to win back Fermanagh and South Tyrone from Sinn Fein and South Antrim from the DUP. There will be no pacts with the DUP under my leadership.”
There will be sections of the party that will worry that this approach could leave the UUP not only still not winning seats, but actually costing unionism seats in places like South, East and North Belfast; and maybe even South Antrim, where a tussle between the UUP and DUP could allow Alliance to slip through. A recent study of the party by Professor Jon Tonge and others (The Ulster Unionist Party: Country Before Party?) suggested that 41% of members ‘want the UUP and DUP to remain separate parties but with electoral alliances/pacts when it suits us.’ So Aiken has to persuade those members that the advantages of no pacts outweigh the risks to unionism overall.
He has also made it clear he wants to win back those former UUP voters who have drifted to Alliance: “I know Naomi well and respect and admire her immensely. She has done a great job for her party in a complex and difficult environment. But I want to bring those people who lent their vote to Alliance back to their natural home in the UUP.”
He knows he has no chance of winning back those votes from Alliance if he has a pact with the DUP: but he can’t be sure of winning them back even without a pact.
There is bad blood between the parties (which has got worse over the last 18 months) and the Tonge book indicated 64.5% of UUP members say there is ‘no chance, very unlikely, or fairly unlikely prospect of Alliance receiving a lower preference transfer vote from them’.
The biggest problem of all for Aiken is setting out a ‘vision’ that halts the ongoing decline of the UUP. He is right when he says that the next general election will be the most important since the last war (Arlene Foster said something similar in her speech on Saturday); but, especially if he has studied electoral statistics, he will know that in moments of crisis unionists tend to back the sitting MP, or else the unionist from the party considered most likely to win.
With the exception of Fermanagh/South Tyrone (and the rule only applies if it is just a UUP candidate – and there have been rumours that Tom Elliott might have another go) there are no seats where the UUP either holds a seat or is the lead party of unionism.
Aiken also knows he won’t be given a first-election-as-leader soft landing if he doesn’t deliver results. He needs to win bankable seats and committed votes: and not just the nudge to success that Mike Nesbitt got in 2015 (welcome though that was), only to see Assembly and Westminster seats tumble just two years later. The party has had far too many ‘could this be the turning point?’ moments since 2005, but not one has proved to have substance.
So, what will his ‘vision’ be? To be honest, I haven’t a clue. In political terms I have no idea what makes him tick. In the few conversations I have had with him he has struck me as thoughtful and decent (in the proper, old-fashioned sense of the word); but I’m not sure if he has what it takes to lead a party as occasionally ‘thran’ as the UUP can be.
There isn’t just one UUP, by the way, there are a number of them and each of them has a view of its own and a base of its own. His job is to try and bring the factions and bases together.
I know he comes from a background in which he gave orders and was used to them being obeyed. But many UUP leaders since the mid-1960s have discovered, to their cost, that the UUP is enormously difficult to contain, control and steer in one direction.
He may find, too, that a hard core of the UUP will agree with John Taylor’s comment: ‘The UUP may wish to show it is different from the DUP but it must rebuild its support by starting in PR elections for councils and the Assembly. To start at the top by splitting the unionist vote in first past the post elections to the Commons would help nationalism.’
I heard that view expressed by a number of UUP members in conversations over the weekend. Their fear – and it is an understandable one – is that the UUP isn’t strong enough to take on the DUP in a one-to-one at the moment; risks unionist seats being lost; divides unionism at a crucial moment; and, in the end, leaves the UUP worse off than it is now.
Aiken is obviously not afraid of a challenge and threw himself into the leadership race very quickly. But he has won without a contest, and becomes leader without any clear sense of what he stands for. His biggest challenge of all? Doing well enough not just to be remembered as the last leader of the UUP.
With many thanks to the: Belfast News Letter for the original story
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