Alliance will not stand down

As first stated by our own Philip Weir here yesterday, it looks like the Alliance Party have called a halt to standing down in favour of other ‘moderate’ parties.Noel MacAdam’s piece which quotes party leader David Ford suggesting that he might have been backed for a peerage, where his candidates to back down in favour of the UUP in several key constituencies.

MacAdam mentions East and South Antrim, and North Down – three crucial battleground constituencies in the next Westminster elections. Though it’s not entirely clear that these are the particular places concerned.

One Alliance source told Slugger that there was no longer a case for treating the UUP as a party of the moderate middle ground, and that it was widely considered (within his own party) that it had moved directly out to the extremes, even as the DUP was moving closer to a role as the voice of the moderate mainstream.

Mick Fealty

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty