Ben Lowry: The Ulster Unionist Party has somehow lost a politician who seemed a natural fit for it

Carl McClean has left the Ulster Unionists in North Down. In his article Mr McClean said he feared the UUP no longer knew what it stood for (but he did not say if he planned to join another party).

It is minor news when a councillor leaves a political party in Northern Ireland given that there are so many parties.

The web version of this article will link to his explanation for leaving the UUP (see link below), but I think his exit raises wider issues than he says, issues that reflect confusion in the pro Union political world.

Carl had worked in the financial world in London and returned to Northern Ireland, hoping to get involved in politics. He was elected to North Down and Ards in 2014, and I happened to be reporting on the count that day he won a council seat. He was obviously articulate, and already – on his first day a councillor – speaking to the media confidently on behalf of the local party (and indeed doing so with the apparent approval of an older, more experienced UUP councillor standing beside him).

While I do not know Carl well, over the years I have bumped into him, such as at the cenotaph in Holywood after the Remembrance Sunday services (he represents the town), and we talked politics.

I asked him to write for this newspaper, and the the small number of articles he has submitted have always been interesting.

He struck me as a type of successful professional you saw in the UUP in the decades from 1945 to the 1990s: Conservative inclined, traditional but nonetheless modern and attuned to their own era.

I would place Carl’s politics close to those of my own, or of Owen Polley, who writes a column for us each Monday – moderate in some respects (such as belief that moral issues are a matter of individual conscience rather than party or state) but firm when it comes to the Union.

In fact, when it comes to protecting Northern Ireland’s place in the UK not merely firm but alarmed at the constant low-level attacks on the constitutional status, and the failure of unionism either to see what is going or, if it does, to combat such attrition in an effective way that commands respect in London.

The struggle to get good people into politics is evident everywhere, even at high state level in England (look how hard Tory prime ministers find it to assemble competent cabinets) and America (the Republican Party had poor presidential hopefuls in 2016, ending up with Donald Trump).

The talent shortage is inevitably worse somewhere as small as Northern Ireland, where the tribal divide either deters prospective politicians from nailing their colours to the mast, or if not spreads them thinly across multiple parties.

I also blame the selfishness of the money-oriented professional classes, few of whom will – like Carl – stand for modestly paid elected office.

While there have always been politicians of character, personality and ability at Stormont across the parties, some MLAs show little interest in the world, and this harms the quality of our governance. We keep being told that Stormont needs to return to tackle the NHS crisis, yet MLAs have failed abjectly to embrace health reform, as urged by experts for 20 years.

I cannot know exactly why Carl left the UUP but one reason is that he was not getting a clear run to run again in Holywood (if he had stayed he would have been one of two candidates vying for what is not even a guaranteed UUP seat). It seems astonishing that the party failed even to ringfence the council seat of the sort of politician who should be fast-tracked into Stormont.

Unionism faces big challenges, such as republican attempts to use the courts to make policy, bypassing politicians, all lavishly funded by legal aid. We need smart people to confront this yet as a journalist I see how this sort of thing passes daily without unionist criticism (Jim Allister typically spots more developments in a week than dozens of the quieter unionist MLAs combined do in a year).

Carl was critical of things that he felt the DUP had got wrong such as alienating people on the mainland by demanding a billion for NI to facilitate Tory rule in 2017 (see link below).

Like the UUP at the time, he opposed an Irish language act (and all the coming sectarian division, litigation and waste it will cause).

While he always seemed publicly loyal to the UUP, he was privately critical of decisions such as their failure to go into opposition after the (deeply flawed, I agree) New Decade New Approach Agreement.

He was privately critical of the way his former party has suddenly embraced ultra liberal, ‘woke’ issues, so that it appeared willing to alienate older voters to attract young Twitter users, thus losing its focus on core matters of unionism.

(I would add that until recently the UUP was often more robust than the DUP on such issues, yet now it is siding with all non unionist parties to demand a unilateral return to Stormont, without providing a critique of the damage that has been done by the ‘place apart’ from Great Britain mentality that devolution fosters – a mentality that will be made worse by the Irish Sea border disaster).

In other words, Carl was clear-eyed about the shortcomings of the two main unionist parties, but loyal to the one that he served and the one for which he seemed a natural fit.

Unionism needs people who see the often oblique threats to the UK and who can think intelligently about how to respond to them.

Now, however, the UUP has somehow lost just such a voice.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor

• Carl McClean: I am quitting the UUP – a party I came back to NI to support

• Carl McClean in 2017: Any unionism worthy of the name will care what the rest of the UK thinks about us

• Ben Lowry last week: Two things to watch out for in 2023, Stormont and strikes

• Ben Lowry last week: 2022 will always for me be the year when mum and dad died