SDLP’s last advantage lies in their cross community appeal…

Okay, I’m deliberately turning this one on its head, partly because the question raised in Ian Parsley’s post poses is more interesting that way. So for me, here’s the payload in Ian’s post: The DUP has proven masterful at taking fairly narrow policy positions and giving them broad appeal; it seems to seek out certain chunks of the electorate and prioritise one particular set of policies to them. The UUP and SDLP, on the other hand, try to sell their …

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Robinson’s policy aims at robust defence via charm offensive…

cropped DUP logo

This is a good distillation of the lessons for Unionism from the NILT survey, and political reality as near as we can discern, from Alex Kane: I think the surest thing we can assume in all of this is that there is a Catholic demographic which is content enough to remain within the United Kingdom. That doesn’t mean they are unionist and it doesn’t even mean that they are, in any active or intellectual sense, pro-Union. It just means that …

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Why Demographics is the Norwegian Blue of NI’s Constitutional politics…

One of the things that’s been puzzling me about the news flows over the last few days. Why, when the NI Life and Times survey has been diligently mapping social and political attitudes over the least 13 years has everyone suddenly got so agitated about social patterns that have been apparent for most of that time. It’s like no one noticed before. But these figures were available when we first published our study of the future of unionism back in …

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