Langhammer on the UUP

  Mark Langhammer considers the fall of the UUP in his latest Daily Ireland article:

UUP gave up on Britishness decades ago

The scale of last week’s Ulster Unionist defeat marked an end to a long process. Unionist politics is dead. Protestant politics reigns. The Chancellor’s subvention aside, the UUP rejected the politics of the Union a long time ago. Formally, it rejected British politics—de facto, the British constitution—in 1986/87, when it expelled its North Down branch and others for supporting British politics. In reality, Ulster unionism had lost its British orientation by Terence O’Neill’s accession in 1963, if not before.

Langhammer writes as someone who has attempted to integrate Northern Ireland into British politics. Marc Mulholland has a post which details the history of Athol Books and the British Irish Communist organisation.