Hermon right to consider Tory deal carefully.

Lady Sylvia Hermon met David Cameron yesterday to discuss the Ulster Unionist / Conservative electoral arrangement, but has yet to come to a ‘final judgment’ as to its merits. It transpires that she is engaged in a series of meetings with senior Tories which will presumably culminate in the UUP MP making clear her attitude to the new Conservative and Unionist force.

Lady Hermon is only now resuming her involvement in politics following the death of her husband, Jack. She is entitled to listen to what Conservatives have to say before coming to a conclusion and it is encouraging that she is obviously giving the deal careful consideration rather than subjecting it to a knee-jerk reaction.

Whilst a small number of dyed-in-the-wool, statist socialists may retain a tribal distrust of the Conservatives, moderate, centrist politicians should not be dismissive of Cameron’s message. If it is the communitarian, society led vision of conservatism which the party continues to emphasise then it is offering an attractive and meritorious alternative to Labour.

Genuine incompatibility of principle would be a legitimate reason to oppose the Conservative / UUP compact, residual loyalty to a discredited government would not.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Sylvia Hermon doesn't know what she wants, other than the fact she seems to have little time for Sir Reg.

If she opposes the new pact on those grounds then she really hasn't got the interests of unionism at heart, only her own petty distractions.
5 February 2009 at 12:16
Anonymous said…
I think Sylvia will be a weather vane for the party membership on this issue. A lot of people will look to her for direction on this issue, as to be brutally honest, they do not trust what they are being told.
5 February 2009 at 23:33
Anonymous said…
I'd be surprised if she doesn't ultimately back it.
6 February 2009 at 10:07
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retained a substantial haul of arms.
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro
Read more