Movement needs to focus on Northern Ireland that works and stops looking like outlier in UK
, and with the continuing internal disagreements about the decision to restore the Assembly at the end of January. It lost three seats. It almost lost another two, with big beasts Gregory Campbell and Sammy Wilson just about holding on with pared-to-the-bone majorities.
Yet the results highlight huge, if not exactly new, problems. The DUP has been damaged and on a scale similar to the damage done to the UUP in 2001 – which was followed shortly afterwards by the party losing all of its representation at Westminster. The UUP will be pleased to have won a seat, but there isn’t really much else to celebrate. And while the TUV is jubilant about Allister’s success, the party remains on the fringes of unionism, with a handful of local councillors and just one MLA.
That’s wafer-thin territory, the sort of territory which should push all of unionism to the same conclusion: you can’t expect to shore-up and expand the base for remaining in the United Kingdom if you spend most of your time squabbling over what it means to be a unionist, while disagreeing over the strategies required to present political/electoral unionism in a vote-attracting light.
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