Conservatives and Unionists set to announce final nine candidates.

The Conservatives and Unionists look set to announce their final nine candidates, filling out the full slate of eighteen, tomorrow morning. I'm led to believe that both the Conservative Area Executive and the Ulster Unionist Executive are scheduled to meet in order to rubber stamp the line-up.

The apparent defection of Deirdre Nelson from the Northern Ireland Conservatives provides further corroborating evidence, and tells us one possible certainly didn't make the cut!

Presaging an announcement, the nine candidates already selected have biographies, added to the Conservatives and Unionists Facebook page. Sir Reg Empey and Owen Paterson appear in this morning's News Letter promoting the benefits of the New Force.

Let's be clear what that means. If the Conservatives win the election, Conservative and Unionist MPs from Northern Ireland will be able to play a full role in a Conservative Government. That includes being eligible to serve as ministers.

No other party standing in Northern Ireland at the election can offer this. It is worth remembering that the largest current party in Northern Ireland secures less than one per cent of the entire United Kingdom vote. The reality is that they are permanently in the lower divisions of UK politics. By contrast, Conservatives and Unionists will be playing in the premier league.

To listen to some commentators or parties here, you would think that the idea of having normal politics is an affront. These people seem to have their own selfish strategic interests in maintaining Northern Ireland as a political backwater – either from the standpoint of a little Ulster mentality or because they want to portray Northern Ireland as a failed entity. We believe that Northern Ireland deserves better.

Conservatives and Unionists will be backing a government committed to tackling our national debt, promoting economic growth, delivering social justice and strengthening society; we will improve our public services and maintain our security in an increasingly dangerous world.

It is only the Conservatives and Unionists who are committed to ending the scandal of double-jobbing that scars politics in this part of the United Kingdom.

In David Cameron, we believe that the United Kingdom will have a Prime Minister with the ideas, the energy and the determination to put our country back on its feet after years of Labour failure. One thing's for sure. We can't go on like this.

That’s why, when the election comes, we’ll be asking people in Northern Ireland – like their counterparts everywhere else in the United Kingdom – to vote for change.

Comments

Ulster Liberal said…
I have outlined my contempt for David Cameron's leadership of the Tory party on this blog several times before so will refrain from doing so again.
Nevertheless, in theory I am supportive of this move and wholeheartedly accept the need for the removal of a sectarian/ethnicity based form of politics from Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland voters should have the same options at the polling view as all British citizens, else we are nothing but second class British citizens.
That said, even if the Tory Party was more acceptable to me (I think David Trimble would make a first-rate Major-esque leader) I think I would still prefer the PUP over the UUP, behind my favoured party Alliance. This is because I think Unionism urgently needs to be more open on class issues, our working class communities are in chronic decline, and I find the lack of religosity conerning their views on moral issues, eg, abortion, a real breath of fresh air. Of course the paramiliary, ahem 'links' and the pre-Cold War era Marxist Leninism outright class warfare would put me off.
20 March 2010 at 10:40
Garza said…
Ulster Liberal, I consider myself an Orange Book Liberal, socially liberal, fiscally conservative. I would love the Lib Dems to run here, as they should and I hope some day in the near future the Alliance and Lib Dems will make a similar pact that the UUP and Tories have made and eventually merge.

However until that day im voting Unionist & Conservative because they are actually walking the walk when it comes to bringing normal politics to NI.
20 March 2010 at 12:19
Anonymous said…
No announcement, then?
3000 versts lets us down :(
20 March 2010 at 12:34
Owen Polley said…
Patience. The meetings started at 11am.
20 March 2010 at 13:15
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 retaine...
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