UUP councillor and former Lord Mayor Jim Rodgers is not happy with the Alliance party.
He said: "They are seen at Michelle O'Neill's shoulder when protests over an Irish language act are being held and they have also thrown their lot in with the Taoiseach in supporting a backstop which drives a coach and horses through the Belfast Agreement, undermines the principle of consent and totally ignores the concerns of unionists. My experience of Alliance in Belfast City Council is that they are in effect in coalition with Sinn Féin and following a nationalist agenda. They are actively courting the nationalist vote having spent years attacking unionists. Many unionists now see it as a third nationalist party."
Well, there you go; no nuance or ambiguity there. But here's a thing worth considering: the UUP has been damaged by Alliance in Belfast. In the 1998 Assembly election Alliance only managed to win one of the 24 seats in Belfast (John Alderdice in East Belfast), while the UUP won five (two in South and East and one in North). At the last Assembly election, in March 2017, the UUP won only one (East) of the now 20 Belfast seats, while Alliance won four. Ironically, Alliance's winning candidate in South Belfast was Paula Bradshaw, a former member of the UUP. Across Northern Ireland Alliance was only 30,000 votes behind the DUP; in 1998 the difference was 120,000.
The question of whether Alliance is, deep down, a pro-Union party has been exercising UUP/DUP/TUV minds for some time. If it's true that it isn't - and there is evidence which points in that direction - then that is a potential problem for mainstream unionism. In the 2017 Assembly election Alliance won 72,000 votes and in the general election a few months later, it won almost 65,000. That's a sizeable chunk of votes; and if Jim Rodgers is correct to describe Alliance as a nationalist party then it's a sizeable chunk of votes which could be going towards Irish unity in the event of a border poll.
Yet I know many people - and I live in East Belfast, a seat which has never ever returned an SDLP or SF MLA - who vote Alliance. And I know that if it came to a border poll they would vote for the UK, even with their reservations over Brexit. They are what can be described as 'soft' unionists: but they are still unionists. Many of them aren't happy with the unionism of the DUP. They have no hang-ups about same-sex-marriage, or abortion law reform. They don't like the 'crocodile' language. They don't like the sort of electoral pacts that the UUP occasionally cuts with the DUP. They're not overly concerned about the flying of flags. They don't like the annual debate about monster bonfires. They don't regard the Alliance as some sort of 'friend' of Sinn Féin. In many cases - and this is probably what spooks some elements of unionism across Belfast - they agree with what Naomi Long says. They don't regard her as anti-Union.
What unionists need to ask themselves is why so many voters - who would be closer to unionism rather than nationalism - seem reasonably content to vote Alliance. It's an important question to ask because, particularly in the case of the UUP, it is costing them votes and seats at both Assembly and council level. In East Belfast, for example, there hasn't been a significant growth in the nationalist vote or demography. But what there has been is a significant growth in the number of 'soft' unionists who are prepared to vote Alliance; something they are unlikely to do if they genuinely believed that Alliance was a threat to the constitutional status quo.
It seems likely that Jim Rodgers has launched an attack on Alliance because the local government elections are only a few weeks away. The UUP, like the SDLP, has problems. If, as seems likely, this election is going to be a spectacular ding-dong between the DUP and SF (one wants a massive vote to stall the chatter about a possible border poll, while the other wants a massive vote to up the ante for the poll) then the two likeliest casualties are their smaller rivals. The UUP probably won't be attracting many first preferences from existing DUP or TUV votes, so it needs to spread the net more widely. And that means tapping into the Alliance vote: particularly that 'soft' unionist core in both East and South Belfast.
Personally, though, I'm not persuaded that the attack-dog approach will work. Generally speaking, telling voters that they are voting for the wrong party doesn't work. Yes, you can attract voters who may be disillusioned or angry with a party they have been voting for; but you also have to offer them something else. Indeed, even if the attack-dog approach worked, it's probably more likely that the voters would leave out the UUP altogether (having previously abandoned them) and either stay at home or jump straight to the DUP. What Jim Rodgers and others in the UUP need to do, is actually find out why voters have switched so much in East, North and South Belfast.
