A party like the UUP can only survive if it does not get too far ahead of the common-sense assumptions of its electorate, writes Dr Steven King
A recent leaked Foreign Affairs brief famously referred to the Ulster Unionist Party as "internally dysfunctional". A very senior Unionist with reason to agree shrugged: "It could be worse, I suppose: we could be externally dysfunctional as well."
Close observers of the Northern situation have, of necessity, become familiar - perhaps depressingly familiar - with the composition of the unwieldy Ulster Unionist Council. In no other Irish party is decision-making so devolved.
In Fianna Fáil - with which comparisons are occasionally made - the Árd Fheis is little more than a rally; decisions are made by the leader (President) and sanctified by the parliamentary party. The old IRA tradition of military discipline dies hard. The comparison with Fianna Fáil falls down, moreover, because there is an asymmetrical relationship between the two main Irish political traditions. Aside from the Orange element - which is only one element - Unionist leaders lack the resource of a binding ethnic nationalism to appeal to. Rather, unionism is an adherence to a permissive framework - the United Kingdom - which imposes few obligations but provides the necessary order and stability within which citizens can express their identity freely, be that Irish, Ulster-Scots, Orange or, increasingly, plain Anglo-American.
In the North, two popes preside: Adams and Paisley. One has led his party for 20 years, the other for over 30. Few know whether or how such leaders can be removed other than by divine intervention. Like the SDLP, they rely on party councils a couple of dozen in strength to make much of policy. Only in the UUP will a mass meeting be required to sanction a return to the inclusive institutions. This abnormality - to nationalist eyes - should come as no surprise. The UUC is still an almost exclusively Protestant body and, as in most Protestant churches, suspicion of the leadership - any leadership - is intense. In 1995, I characterised the Ulster Unionist Council as Presbyterian democracy conducted with Anglican decorum. In that sense it is Democratic Unionism, with its cult of personality, which is deviant.
Having been through the trauma of the splits of the 1970s once, Stormont was no longer there to defend, having seen their churches rent by division into innumerable sects, the delegates this week suspected any putative leader who threatened to "consider his position" if he failed to get his way. The pathological tendency to schism - to break away on a point of principle - is well understood by Protestants and unionists but it is admired and feared in equal measure. Ultimately, the UUC delegates concluded the major point of principle - sharing power with republicans - was one that had already been accepted or conceded.
A dominant media stereotype of the UUC is of gatherings of grey heads sitting with lips pursed as David Trimble tries to inveigle them into what in their heart of hearts they regard as ill-disguised appeasement. One frustrated British cabinet minister, referred to the council as, "old men completely out of touch, holding up the process". Such criticisms, though, are based on delusory ideas that the party is more reactionary than "sensible" or "progressive" unionist opinion. Going back to the leaked document, it is as if Ulster Unionism will not - or cannot - see its own best interests. Irritating as these UUC meetings must have been to the Anglo-Irish officials, not to mention the Sinn Féin politburo, they have all (bar one on policing) gone in Trimble's desired direction. They committed a majority of activists to support for the Belfast Agreement and to power-sharing with an Irish dimension. This despite, as recent polls have shown, opinion in the party actually being in advance - not behind - that of the unionist electorate where support for the Agreement is at an all-time low.
This represents a remarkable transformation when Trimble's position is compared with that of O'Neill, Chichester-Clark and Faulkner. Then, as now, there was a strong current of opinion inside and outside the party that saw the governments' policies as ones of abject surrender to pressure from the Civil Rights movement and, subsequently, on the foot of republican violence. Under O'Neill and his successors, the right's opposition did not prevent the implementation of the full Civil Rights agenda before Stormont's prorogation, but it did reduce the UUP to a divided, incoherent and demoralised state.
In his important history of the Unionist Party published in 1973, John Harbison concluded: "Indeed unless a Unionist leader of vision and authority emerges, and emerges fairly soon, it is likely that the Unionist Party as it has existed since 1905 will destroy itself. Paradoxically, it may be that only through the destruction of the Unionist Party can the Ulster problem be permanently solved."
But, although the leaders turned out to be Harry West and James Molyneaux - men not without qualities, but men with a severe vision deficit - the UUP has not been destroyed and arguably the Ulster problem is, at least in terms of a zero-sum Orange-Green conflict, being transformed so as to put an end to violence.
It would be as absurd to overplay the role of the UUC or of Trimble's leadership in this process as it would be to deny them. What has changed within the party since the 1960s is the balance between realism and the Canute-like defence of redoubts of local Protestant power - important as they have been to the amour propre of unionists, particularly in West Ulster.
The tragedy of Unionists such as the murdered Tyrone Senator John Barnhill was that their real fears that reforms would lead to "the loss of three counties", and thus Northern Ireland's destruction, led them to oppose reforms that would have actually stabilised the North's position within the UK. As Lord Charlemont, Sir James Craig's Education Minister, once said, the Union does not exist to satisfy the sectarian prejudices of unionists. The unionist nightmare of key Border Unionist figures like Harry West and Noreen Cooper did come to pass in terms of a genocidal IRA campaign against Protestants. Yet, terrible though it was, it failed in its fundamental objective of driving Britain out of Ireland.
Ironically, Fermanagh - the bedrock of opposition to reformist Unionism in the 1960s - has been at the forefront of pro-Agreement forces within the Party. Having been lacerated by the "cutting edge" of IRA "armed struggle" Fermanagh Unionists have seen that campaign defeated. Most understand that having withstood the worst that could be thrown at them, their position is secure.
Ultimately a pan-class party like the UUP can only survive if it does not get too far ahead of the common-sense assumptions of its electorate. In the late 1960s with a weak Unionist government subject to relentless pressure from London and civil disorder increasingly complemented by a terrorist offensive, the politics of pragmatic adjustment were out of kilter with the primordial passions of the streets and isolated farmhouses. In such situations it is difficult for parties to do much more than survive.
But it did survive. Ulster Unionist Council meetings can be tedious for outsiders and, occasionally, the party leadership alike. But they do have a therapeutic effect, providing several hundred ordinary unionists with a sense of ownership of the process. Anti-Agreement elements would do well to remember who put the UUC back at the centre of political life in Northern Ireland.
Dr Steven King is political adviser to Ulster Unionist Leader, David Trimble