Letter: Possible UUP deselection of Doug Beattie would be a major blunder for unionism
A letter from Edward Ferrin:
Former prime minister Sir John Major has often pointed to the severe decline in the quality of our politicians at Westminster level – arguing that the days when a Labour MP was from a humble, working class, trade union background are over, the days when a Conservative MP was a successful businessman or a former soldier are no longer the case.
Sir John Major rightly highlights the fundamental issue unfolding in modern day politics – there are far too many people elected to office who don’t understand, feel or believe in much of what their own political party stood for or what it should continue to stand for.
The recent battle over whether Doug Beattie will be re-selected by the Upper Bann UUP Association is a prime example of this. The UUP, like the Conservatives, has long been viewed as a party of the successful businessman or businesswoman, the farmer, the soldier and the police officer.
Opponents within political unionism in Northern Ireland have often been quick to decry the former UUP leader as a ‘Lundy’ or ‘a traitor’ and as someone who is not a real, committed unionist like they are. Those so-called unionists who put a double-knotted noose around a poster of Doug Beattie in Lurgan in 2022 at an anti-Protocol protest should have been reminded that the same man on that poster served the United Kingdom in the armed forces, serving in the Royal Irish Regiment – something a vast majority of people within unionism have not done.
The UUP has a democratic process to choose who they wish to see as their constituency candidates in Assembly elections, and it is for members of the party in Upper Bann to decide the outcome. However, deselection of Doug Beattie as a candidate for the UUP would be a strategic mistake. Political unionism needs public servants such as Doug Beattie, who has served the UK and its people outside and inside the corridors of Stormont and who offers alternative solutions to that espoused by keyboard warriors and career politicians who claim to be the ‘real’ unionists because they represent social conservative, insular politics which does not build a strong, positive advertisement for Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom.
Political unionism has not learnt a long, valuable lesson: it will never succeed in broadening its appeal beyond social conservatives, Protestants and Brexit supporters unless it views intra-party competition and disagreement positively as strength, not weakness. The UUP will be the poorer if it was to deselect Doug Beattie.
Removing a 'moderate' unionist in the hope of returning a more conservative unionist in their place could likely backfire and deliver an additional non-Unionist in their place.
Doug Beattie’s vision of a ‘Union of People’ was not electorally successful for his party in 2022, but as history is written in the coming years, that vision will be remembered as highly significant if political unionism in Northern Ireland takes the right direction and wins the constitutional debate on the quality and benefits of the union to Northern Ireland, not the ‘culture war’ that is simply just a make-belief intellectual debate for unionist politicians who have no intelligence or capacity to develop an intellectual or coherent answer as to how they build a stronger Northern Ireland in a stronger United Kingdom.
Edward Ferrin, Belfast BT14