From Ludlow To Londonderry

On both sides of the Irish Sea, the Right, broadly defined, is falling apart to a most startling extent. Christopher Gill is the UKIP candidate for Ludlow. He previously represented that constituency as a Conservative. William Ross is the Traditional Unionist Voice candidate for Londonderry East. He previously represented that constituency, for a very long time, as an Ulster Unionist.

Gill is a mainstay of the doolally Freedom Association, advocates of every economic policy that has now been spectacularly discredited, and historically funded by apartheid South Africa. Gill's adoption indicates that Lord Pearson's UKIP has nothing to offer that half of its vote for Strasbourg which is Old Labour or, especially in the West Country, Old Liberal rather than Old Tory.

Nor to offer the Old Tory half, come to that. Gill's and Pearson's position has nothing to do with that of those Tories who opposed first Thatcherism and then Maastricht. The economically populist and pro-manufacturing, morally and socially conservative, staunchly Unionist and pro-military, strongly church-based Toryism of the Wintertons. Or the unyieldingly constitutionalist and civil libertarian Toryism of Richard Shepherd. Or the Keynesian, pro-Commonwealth, anti-neoconservative Toryism of Sir Peter Tapsell. Or the conservationist, agrarian, anti-nuclear (indeed, Quaker) Toryism of Sir Richard Body, UKIP President, but for how much longer?

And Ross, in his days as UUP Chief Whip at Westminster, was Chairman of the Northern Ireland Committee of the Monday Club. So, no obvious appeal there to the TUV's most obvious target audience of disaffected DUP supporters, as economically populist and social democratic as they are morally and socially conservative, just so long as plenty of the spending is on the Protestant working class in Northern Ireland. Even the UUP was always Tory rather than Thatcherite as a party, very much like the figures described above, and indeed with close links to several of them.

But it is notable that, in Ross, the TUV has an integrationist Party President. Especially in its doubts about the devolution of Policing and Justice, the UUP has also been manifesting integrationist tendencies of late, whereas time was when figures Jeffrey Donaldson or Arlene Foster defected from it to the DUP. Is integrationism always to be the position of Unionists other than whichever lot of them happens to provide either the First Minister or Deputy First Minister at any given time, to be dropped at the first whiff of power? In many ways, that would accurately sum up the real attitude of all of them towards the Union. They are at least as stale and as useless as the mainland parties. Yes, as stale and as useless as that.