Not Their Troubles To Seek

First the trouble over the devolution of Policing and Justice, and now the UUP is signing up Councillors and other activists who left the DUP in protest at power-sharing with Sinn Féin. Yet time was when figures such figures as Jeffrey Donaldson and Arlene Foster defected from the UUP to the DUP, in protest at power-sharing with Sinn Féin.

It seems that a sort of bottom-line integrationism is always to be the position of whichever Unionist party is not providing either the First Minister or the Deputy First Minister at the given time. But it will always be dropped at the first whiff of power. In many ways, that would accurately sum up the real attitude of both of them, as parties, towards the Union.

In the meantime, however, what effect will an influx of moral and social conservatives, who are if anything economically social democratic so long as the spending is on the Protestant working class (and why not? - that does not preclude spending on other people as well), have on the UUP in general, and in particular on its electorally disastrous alliance with David Cameron?