DUP regroups for election fightback
THE DUP meets for its annual conference ending a year where its rise has been dramatically halted.
Ahead of the gathering, party leader tells News Letter Political Correspondent SAM McBRIDE how his party can change
TODAY the DUP — a party which has risen for most of an almost four-decade existence — meets to contemplate its future in light of a year where that rise has been dramatically halted.
The annual party conference in the La Mon Hotel has been given the title 'Building on success' but electorally the party has seen its European election vote almost halve in a year where former DUP MEP Jim Allister emerged as a serious challenger.
Tough year in Government, as well as at the polls
Media expenses coverage attacked
Leadership 'not that different'
Friday afternoon saw a series of workshops for party members, including one focussed on 'Effective canvassing and campaigning' — a crucial issue as next spring's General Election approaches — and a 100-a-head fundraising dinner.
Speaking to the News Letter in his office at Stormont Castle ahead of the conference, DUP leader Peter Robinson acknowledged that the party has faced a series of difficulties in the last 12 months but was sanguine about its future.
The office is adorned with framed photographs of Mr Robinson meeting the Queen, US Presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
A photo of the First Minister with EU Commission President Manuel Barroso waits behind the First Minister's desk until a space is found for it on the wall but there is no photo of Mr Robinson alongside his partner in Stormont Castle, Martin McGuinness, with whom he has had an increasingly fractious relationship.
A vastly experienced politician, Mr Robinson swiftly acknowledges that it has been a difficult year for the party.
"I don't think that you get any easy years in Northern Ireland politics," the veteran East Belfast MP says with a pained smile, "and this has been a difficult year for us.
"It was always going to be so — I think we recognised that."
However, that recognition received little if any public articulation, leading to the shock many DUP supporters felt at its dramatic fall in support at the June poll.
To date, the DUP argument for its disastrous showing in that election — although Mr Robinson takes issue with that description — was that voters reacted against its MPs' expense claims, dissatisfaction with the ruling parties' handling of the recession and a series of other controversies such as double-jobbing.
But Mr Robinson argues that there was an added advantage to Mr Allister as a sitting MEP, something the DUP leader said would benefit his party's nine sitting MPs when they face the voters in next year's General Election.
"I'm not sure that I take the same view that many in the Press take of it being a disaster of an election (for the DUP).
"We fought an incumbent MEP — that's the first time in the history of Northern Ireland that an incumbent (MEP) has had their seat taken away from them — and so that was always going to be difficult; there's always an advantage in incumbency...we still maintain our position of being the largest unionist party."
At the start of this week, the DUP's ruling executive unanimously agreed 80 proposals which reviewed "every aspect" of the party's operation, among them a move which will reduce the influence for MPs and other elected members within the party officer corps and give "lay-people" drawn from among its ordinary members more power.
Mr Robinson acknowledges that the party has been poor at communicating its message, something he and the party's other ministers accept blame for as they were "so involved in the business of governance" that they did not "show people what we had been doing and why we had been doing it."
But the overhaul of the party's operations will also include "radical" changes to its communications team, including bringing in extra staff and greater use of new internet technologies.
As part of the party's re-engagement with its members, a smartly-designed glossy 36-page document will be launched at today's conference and an abridged version will be distributed to homes across the Province.
The 'Building on Success' publication, which Mr Robinson described as a "playbook for the party membership" and another DUP source enthusiastically described as their "members' "Bible", focuses on the party's decision to go into government, what it argues are the lack of viable alternatives, and rebutting the attacks of the party's opponents.
In an implicit admission that the DUP did not prepare its supporters for entering government with Sinn Fein, Mr Robinson says: "It's the kind of thing that we should have done when we entered into the Assembly and Executive.
"We should have done it on the same kind of professional basis that we are now doing it...but better late than never."
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Tuesday 14 February 2012
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