No embed for the CU’s PEB, so here’s the link… Well that’s what they are calling themselves these days (UCU-NF is sooo 2008 Gerry ;-))… Okay, quickly… It had much of the focus the SDLP PEB lacked… Professional voice over from Davy Sims… Though the ambiguity of the ‘fly-in’ party leader pictures that almost promise to meld, but don’t, is sort of fitting but not altogether in a good way… The only decent attack line is Trevor Ringland’s on double jobbing… Nice cameo from Mike Nesbitt, but as Lee notes the ‘Way Out’ sign at the airport behind his head distracts, again not in an entirely good way… A quiet election suits both incumbents in Northern Ireland (Slugger hears there is not much DUP canvassing going on in the Lagan Valley constituency, which may just mean they are concentrating on their ‘marginals’)…
Of course, the CUs may not want to be seen to act in an unseemly manner. Yet the Conservative party in Britain knows how to pick local fights (there was some scary messaging on immigration last weekend, presumably to strengthen the resolve of the base and ward off UKIP in a tight South West marginal)…
And it is probably not enough just to push the raw Tory message in Northern Ireland: more translation of that project and what it stands for needs to be translated into an Ulster vernacular… In short, they need to break some Delpht (though we’d recommend that not all it should come from their own precious collection) along the way…
Competent, but not a game changer… In Northern Ireland, as in Scotland and Wales, the Tory/UU interest is still very much a minority game…
What did you think?
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