There is a certain whiff that comes off a political party when it is in trouble.
People start to get a wee bit panicky. Indiscreet remarks are made to the media. Off-the-cusp opinions are expressed by party insiders. Policies are adopted on the fly. The party leader and those closest to him will make speeches advocating x, y and z while others in the party are off pursuing a, b and c. Confusion and a lack of direction become the norm. Members soon start to brief against each other. Rumours spread about “discontent”, “dissatisfaction” and eventually that fatal word will be uttered: “heave”.
At this moment in time the liberal Unionists of the Alliance Party are beginning to emit a certain odour. Ever since the vote of Belfast City Council to reduce the number of days the British national flag flies over the city hall the AP has been in trouble. Despite the democratic nature of the vote, and the fact that the Alliance saved the council from real trouble with its compromise motion instead of the SDLP’s and Sinn Féin’s original proposition of no flags at all, the party has been on the receiving end of a torrent of verbal and physical abuse from the extreme of the British Unionist minority in the north-east of the country. Anti-democracy protesters, including some from the British terror gangs, have attacked the offices and homes of AP members as well as issuing individual threats to Alliance politicians. The political leaders of Unionism, in the form of the DUP and UUP, have firmly placed the AP in the crosshairs of the militant edge of their community and made it clear that they intend to exploit that situation in any future elections.
And that is the problem for the Alliance Party. Despite its public protestations to be a “cross- community” or “non-sectarian” grouping it is clearly a small “u” Unionist party that relies on liberal Unionist voters and some pale green Nationalist voters to survive (not to mention a sympathetic press and some rather shadowy funding from “charities” in Britain linked to the Liberal-Democrat party). As a political party the AP is restricted to a handful of constituencies at a Westminster and Stormont level, mainly in affluent regions of counties Down and Antrim. Outside of those areas it has virtually no existence. And it is certainly no coincidence that electorally significant minorities of Roman Catholics or Nationalists live amongst majority Unionist populations in those parts of the North of Ireland where the Alliance Party prospers. The stereotype of the AP as party designed to appeal to well-off and open-minded Unionist academics, doctors, solicitors and teachers as well as some middle-class Catholics businessmen and “aspirational types” in the Nationalist community is not without truth. That is certainly the case in those constituencies where the peculiar British first-past-the-post method or the PR system at Stormont means the Alliance Party needs those Catholic/Nationalist votes to surpass its Unionist rivals.
No surprise then that the feeble Alliance Party leader, David Ford, has taken fright at the vitriol directed towards his party from within the Unionist community and is now trying to appeal to some supposedly dissatisfied SDLP voters in a desperate attempt to replace an expected falling-off of Unionist votes with more straightforwardly Nationalist ones in the AP’s marginal seats. Some have rightly dismissed this for the self-serving stunt that it is. But here comes the confusion and lack of direction. For while Ford criticises the SDLP for its position on the flags’ issue he also effectively attacks parents in the Nationalist community for turning away from state-run – by which he means British-run – schools when seeking education for their children.
This is not unrelated to David Ford’s position as the leader of a party increasingly the default home for dissident Unionism. Over recent weeks several former UUP members have drifted into the Alliance Party bringing with them a certain, shall we say, point of view on the “national question”. These have been joined by other assorted Unionist flotsam and jetsam. Which hardly makes the AP more Nationalist-friendly on the face of it.
To make matters worse for a party that is clearly in panic-mode the Alliance is now trying to balance its half-hearted appeal to SDLP voters with a stronger appeal directed straight to Unionist ones by advocating that the British national flag should fly on all council buildings across the north-east of Ireland on the so-called designated days. This means that places like Derry which haven’t seen a British flag in a decade or more will now see it flying over local government buildings several times a year. But that is not the end of the AP’s confusion. It is now taking on the two main Nationalist parties in the form of Sinn Féin and the SDLP who oppose the imposition of the National Crime Agency or NCA, the so-called “British FBI”, on the North of Ireland. Given that there seems to be little appetite in the Irish Nationalist community as a whole to see any significant change in policing in the north-east of Ireland as agreed down through the years, and which the forced role of the NCA would clearly represent, the Alliance Party is putting clear blue water between it and the wishes of its Nationalist / Catholic voters.
With a brief turn to the progressive Nationalist left the Alliance Party is now swerving off to the regressive Unionist right and with it goes its electoral future.
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
Not surprisingly, I agree with this analysis. 🙂
Alliance…the fifth largest party….strutted about just too arrogantly for decency …as the third party. And while all reasonable people will remain appalled at the violence directed against Alliance people and their families…by fascists….there has to be reasonable questions asked about the competence of the six Alliance councillors in Belfast. Doubling your seats is of course an achievement but a Pyrrhic victory if the ne councillors are out of their depth and the three senior councillors appear to have miscalculated.
There is a fault line between let’sgetalongerists and liberal unionists which the fig leaf of agnostic about the border can no longer cover. Ford is 62….he was invisible for weeks…the two MLAs from East BeLfast have not had a good we weeks….and if I was Naomi Long…I’d be disappointed in Ford, Lyttle, Cochrane and the councillors.
It cannot be a happy ship….and I get the impression that there will be a lot of jockeying for position.
They seem rattled with increasingly tetchy ….at anyone daring to question either their competence or political integrity.
Two years ago I told anyone who would listen that Alliance was a dangerous and unprincipled political party with no more ambition than getting a crucial eighth seat and usurp the position of the third and fourth party.
The intent was to use their influence to target UUP votes and SDLP votes.
The UUP is clearly beyond help but paradoxically Alliance need the erosion of votes from UUP and SDLP to be in tandem….and the accepted wisdom is that SDLP have rallied.
Alliance badly need to re-habilitation themselves with loyalists and no surprise that the SDLP is a target….the attack on Catholic education would frankly be regarded as crude sectarianism if it ws made by DUP and UUP.
For 40 years Alliance have been given a bye ball….by media and rival politicians. Indeed the problem, particularly for SDLP is that it never calculated that Alliance was a rival….and unprincipled.
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I suspect the AP will face some heavy reverses in the Westminster and Stormont elections, especially if the DUP continues to swallow up the UUP. The theory is that disaffected UUP voters will go to the Alliance. Maybe. But I’m sure many will stay with a rump UUP or drift to the DUP. Meantime the AP is doing nothing to make itself more attractive to nationalists of any variety. Possibly the reverse.
You are quite correct about the sectarian overtones to Ford’s remarks. The SDLP should challenge the AP (and DUP/UUP) on the eduction matter, with a put up or shut up scenario. A neutral education system agreed between all the parties where Irish and British culture and nationalities are given an equal footing. De-Britishize the education system if you expect Nationalist pupils to take part in it, including obligatory Irish language classes alongside English language ones.
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As well as the UUP vote going to Alliance, DUP, rump UUP, there is also the possibility of Independents and Conservatives to crowd the middle ground, not to mention the Greens already being there.
A caveat.
There is a contradiction post 1688 Glorious Revolution and even post 1789 French Revolution.
In Ireland…Catholicism is linked with Republicanism and Protestantism with Monarchy.
The “Catholics” are to the left of the “Protestants”.
In Britain the position is reversed…the Whigs or the Enlightened are latently anti Catholic, anti High Church.
So theres this curious thing where Guardian reading English Republicans are pro union in a Scottish sense but wouldnt be seen dead in the company of a DUP person. Think…Polly Toynbe.
Likewise think the late Norman St John Stevas resident sycophantic Tory and lover of all things “royal” who wasa Catholic.
Modern Jacobites and European legitimists (they havent gone away you know) think republicanism is satanic but are “catholic”.
English liberals and their liberal unionist cousins might be republican but often anti Catholic.
The point I am trying to make here is that in the norn iron context, anti catholic feeling, anti-catholicism is an expected feature of an Eleventh Night bonfire…..but you wouldnt expect Polly Toynbe or a member of the Alliance Party to show up.
The anti-catholicism of “liberals” is science based, a product of the Enlightenment but in its own way just as nasty.
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Before the flag protests began, Alliance appeared to be losing a lot of support among its more liberal voters in East Belfast over the party’s local MLAs not voting in favour of the Green Party/SF marriage equality bill at Stormont in October. The party’s official policy was in favour, but when the vote came up only four voted this way, one voted against and three were no-shows (two of them from East Belfast). There’s a chance some of these voters will go back to Alliance out of sympathy in the aftermath of the flag vote, but the party has burnt many bridges there that may not be easily repaired.
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Perhaps. They seem to be in a dither at the moment, trying to appeal to all and in the process appealing to nobody. I suspect that if Ford stays in his leadership position the party will up its Unionist credentials in the coming months.
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