Parting Parties

Liberals and Social Democrats? Whigs and Radicals? Neither quite works, but a split in the Lib Dems certainly seems to be on the cards. That said, the one thing that would really finish off the Lib Dems as a party would be the end of First Past The Post for the Westminster elections that determine the shape of the parties, since the Lib Dems are hopeless at anything else.

Liberal Unionists, Liberal Imperialists, National Liberals, the disciples of Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon (themselves funded by Oliver Smedley), the daughter of Alderman Alfred Roberts: their successive takeovers of the age-old Tory machine are the very definition of the Conservative Party, and the Orange Book Tendency, which already seems to provide many of the Coalition's ideas, could very easily repeat the trick. The rest would never join or re-join Labour, and it might not be willing to have them. But both the Liberal Party and the SDP still exist.

Meanwhile, what of the once-mighty UUP, now with less Ministerial entitlement than the Alliance Party? Its liberals are already heading off for that party. Its rural and urban machine politicians could fit quite well into a DUP which is increasingly like that, anyway.

And then there are those who remain in the UUP very largely because whichever of the two Unionist parties is not providing the First Minister is that much more sceptical about the entire arrangement, as the UUP was when it resisted the devolution of policing and justice. There is also the DUP's continuing lack of affinity even with the Conservative Evangelical wings of the Church of Ireland, the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and the Methodist Church in Ireland, and therefore also with the Orange Order, the Royal Black Preceptory and the Apprentice Boys. For them, there is the TUV, with which the UUP has been known to seek an accommodation. After all, while it is led by a Free Presbyterian former DUP MEP, its President is an erstwhile UUP Chief Whip at Westminster, a Loyal Orders stalwart, a Monday Club veteran, and a member of the General Synod of the C of I.

As for the future of the SDLP, who knows? Somehow, it never quite goes under. But how it doesn't is, frankly, anyone's guess. I mean that purely objectively and with not a little admiration. Do even they know how they do it?