Allister answers Sammy Wilson's hit and run jibes
15 December 2009
In today's News letter TUV Leader Jim Allister answers yesterday's attack from Sammy Wilson:
The unsubstantiated hit and run jibe has long been a favoured DUP guerrilla tactic. So it was no surprise to see it deployed in Sammy Wilson’s Monday column. As a shameless salesman for failure, having paraded the phoney ‘success’ of the Executive – that is the Executive that’s teetering into the abyss – he parted with this empty flurry, “It is also why the Jim Allister/TUV strategy of splitting the unionist vote, making Sinn Fein the biggest party in Northern Ireland, bringing the Assembly down and restoring Direct Rule, should hold no attraction for thinking unionists.”
Let me be clear, TUV would not exist if the DUP had not abandoned its principles and pledges. So, the creation of an additional party within unionism is of the DUP’s own making; a by-product of its shameful coalition with IRA/Sinn Fein. Would Sammy Wilson prefer if 66,000 Unionists had stayed at home in the Euro election - for without TUV they would have had no one to vote for - and nationalism would have won two seats. The DUP has much to be thankful for to TUV voters, because without their transfers the DUP would not have limped home sub quota into the third seat.
So, far from splitting the unionist vote TUV ensures a higher Unionist turnout – as in June – because now that third of unionism which rejects terrorists in government has someone to vote for and, as we demonstrated, through our transfers can help unionism triumph over nationalism. It’s time the DUP recognised it is now only a minority party within unionism, with no divine right not to be challenged or held to account.
As for the bogeyman of Sinn Fein becoming the biggest party and thereby entitled to the post of First Minister, who made that possible? None other than Mr Wilson and the DUP through their complicit acquiescence in the change wrought by the St Andrews Bill! Why, because Peter Robinson thought it would be terribly clever to be able to duress Unionists into voting DUP if the threat existed of Sinn Fein being First Minister. That is why when the change to the First Minister coming from the biggest party was debated in the House of Commons on 21 November 2006 neither Sammy Wilson, nor any other DUP MP made a squeak of protest, or even forced a vote on the second reading, or any stage, of the Bill. DUP fingerprints are all over the legislative change which allows McGuinness to become First Minister, so they need not now pretend others are the reason for that threat. This was how the DUP desired it to be.
As for the taunt about wanting to bring the Assembly down – that, of course, is the Assembly which among many ordinary voters is a byword for waste and failure – I am quite happy to stand where Sammy Wilson stood when in 2005 he asked the people to elect him on a manifesto which said: “If executive devolution cannot be set up on a satisfactory democratic basis, then the only option is to make Direct Rule more accountable and acceptable. We would work with the Government to provide the maximum accountability in these circumstances and attempt to integrate Northern Ireland more firmly within the United Kingdom.” The same forgotten manifesto pledged Mr Wilson and the other DUP MPs to the stance that mandatory coalition with Sinn Fein was “out of the question”!
TUV does prefer devolution but it must be devolution that is democratic and durable, not the farce of the present Stormont, built on the anti-democratic absurdity of mandatory coalition whereby the basic rights to vote a party out of government and to even have an Opposition are denied.
