Some more on Lady Sylvia

Gonzo wrote on Lady Sylvia Hermon’s speech to the North Down SDLP last week. Here, the excellent Alan Trench of “Devolution matters” gives his take.
He quotes Eamonn Mallie’s twitter thus:

“It’s good to be among friends.” The words of Sylvia Hermon addressing an SDLP dinner in Bangor? I wonder what she meant ?”
Trench continues:
“If a moderate, social-democratically-inclined, Unionist is finding herself more comfortable in the company of her moderate, social-democratic nationalist counterparts, that may say something one hadn’t expected about the ability of the St Andrews Agreement to drive together the ‘moderate centre’ in Northern Ireland. (I’m still sceptically inclined to regard it as the exception not the rule, though.) But the one thing the British Conservatives did not intend in creating the UCUNF alliance was to fracture the Unionist community along left-right lines – and if that is the result of the alliance, it suggests it has misfired in even more ways than one thought.”

Perhaps extrapolating a little too far?

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