'Unionist vision, strategy and promotion is a mess'
ALEX Kane, who until a month ago was key to the Ulster Unionist Party's inner workings, has left the party and will not be re-joining, he has revealed.
The UUP's director of communications since 2008, Mr Kane, who joined his father's Armagh Ulster Unionist branch as a teenager in 1971, resigned his position on the party staff in January amid disagreements about strategy and the choatic nature of the party's processes.
However, his UUP membership is understood to have expired and Mr Kane said that he would not be re-joining the UUP - or any other party - in disillusionment at the direction which unionist politics has taken.
The News Letter columnist, who worked as an aide to Enoch Powell in the 1970s, first campaigned for the party in the 1970 General Election, the election which saw Ian Paisley's entry to Westminster.
In recent years he became a central figure in the UUP's modest revival from its humbling 2005 nadir, helping to overhaul the historic party's antiquated rules and processes.
But Mr Kane, who left the UUP for several years in the early 1990s for the Conservatives before re-joining, said that his decades of party political activism are at an end.
Recalling his decision to become a UUP member as a teenager, he said: "I joined because I believed (and still do) that the Union has to be a two-way process - supported strongly in Belfast and London.
"But that support cannot be half-hearted, conditional or ambiguous.
"I left the Conservatives because of their refusal, during the 1996 Forum Elections, to take a strong, unambiguous line on the Union."
Speaking of the UUP's new Tory electoral partners, he added: "To be blunt, I'm not sure that I trust Cameron. He completely crumbled on the Lisbon Treaty issue and if forced into making a call between backing unionism or rolling over to a new Sinn Fein demand I suspect that he would roll over.
"Look how quickly he backed the Hillsborough Agreement a few weeks ago. The ink was barely dry before he had issued his statement of support."
However, Mr Kane said that he believed the UUP had been right to "test the waters" with the Conservatives and said that he was open to being proven wrong about Mr Cameron's unionist credentials.
"It may turn out that I am utterly wrong on the strength of Cameron's unionism and that he will stand shoulder to shoulder with us and do everything required to promote, protect and preserve the link between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.
"I hope that he does and I will be the first to acknowledge it if it happens."
Mr Kane said that he had suggested changes to a draft of the joint Daily Telegraph article by Sir Reg Empey and David Cameron in 2008 which announced that both parties were pursuing closer ties. He said that he had also suggested changes to a draft of Mr Cameron's speech to the UUP conference later that year.
However, he said, none of his suggestions had been accepted by the Tories.
"It was a few paragraphs which would have toughened up the tone and commitment. The Conservative side rejected the wording.
“That rejection concerned me at the time - and still does.”
Mr Kane said that he had left his job with the UUP at the end of January partly because he had become a father at the age of 54 after his partner suffered four miscarriages, partly because of “grave reservations” over the detail of the UUP’s relationship with the Tories and partly due to worries about the UUP’s secret talks - which he knew nothing of - with the DUP at Schomberg House and Hatfield House in recent months.
“In essence, though, my heart wasn’t in the job.
“I am no longer a member of the UUP and it is not my intention to join again.
“Indeed, I will not be a member of any political party again. I want to concentrate on my writing, commentary, consultation and journalism and I want to have the absolute freedom of expression that accompanies the non party member or party political activist.”
Mr Kane, who is now writing a book about unionism, said that he firmly believed the pro-Union political vision, strategy and promotion of itself was “a mess”.
Although in a recent News Letter column Mr Kane said his biggest regret was backing the Belfast Agreement, he insisted that the UUP was right to stay in the talks which led to the Agreement, arguing that there was nothing else which the party could have done.
Continued on page 22
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Tuesday 29 May 2012
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