TUV CAMPAIGN:JIM ALLISTER of the Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) party has insisted that he can retain his European seat even though he was elected four years ago while standing for the DUP.
Mr Allister broke away from the DUP and formed his own party because of the Rev Ian Paisley’s decision to share power with Sinn Féin at Stormont. Yesterday there was no hiding his hostility towards his former colleagues in the DUP.
“If the DUP were honest their message in this election would be: terrorists in government, education in chaos, IRA army council intact. What odds. Vote Dodds!” he said when launching his manifesto.
Mr Allister opened his press conference with a stinging attack on the BBC and UTV, claiming that as a sitting MEP he should be afforded similar air time as the DUP candidate Diane Dodds, notwithstanding that the TUV is a much smaller party and that he has left the DUP.
Mr Allister also made clear that his main platform was seeking to have Sinn Féin forced out of the Northern Executive because “nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right”.
He said he was the only candidate “opposed to terrorists in government” and, he added, he was getting a warm reception for this stand on the doorsteps.
“If people are happy with Martin McGuinness as joint First Minister and are content to turn a blind eye to the murder of Paul Quinn – a crime which Diane Dodds’s election agent said ‘everybody knows’ was carried out by the IRA – they will not be voting TUV,” he added.
“But if people are repelled by the fact that they have three convicted terrorists in their government and repudiate a system which denies people the democratic essentials of an opposition and being able to vote a party out of office then they will be voting Allister 1 on June 4th.”
Among the reasons the DUP has put forward in urging unionists to vote for Ms Dodds is to prevent the Sinn Féin candidate Bairbre de Brun topping the poll. However, Mr Allister said “people see right through the hypocrisy and cynicism” of this position. “Here they are working 9 to 5 in Stormont, propping up Sinn Féin in government and then going out in the evening knocking the doors, if they dare, to say we are the party to stop Sinn Féin. Such rank hypocrisy has seldom been seen in Ulster politics.”
Mr Allister said that policing and justice should not be devolved to the Northern Executive because not only would “terrorists” have a part in running a justice department but these security responsibilities would also “come under the ambit of the North-South Ministerial Council where unionists are in a permanent minority”.
Mr Allister said he was also opposing the growth of a European super-state. “National sovereignty will be a key plank in my campaign for re-election. Voting TUV in this poll is the best way to demonstrate your opposition to the Lisbon Treaty and the haemorrhaging of powers from national parliaments,” he added.
Mr Allister predicted that he would win the seat with a vote that would “stun” the media.
Meanwhile, First Minister Peter Robinson at a DUP election campaign event said that a number of DUP MPs who also serve as Assembly members would not be standing in the next Westminster elections. He said that a “further tranche” of DUP double-jobbing MPs would also stand down from the Assembly in the subsequent Westminster elections, although, he indicated, where there were exceptional circumstances some MPs could maintain the dual mandate. There would also be a phasing out of the system where MLAs double-jobbed as councillors.
At the event attended by Ms Dodds and other senior DUP MPs and MLAs Mr Robinson launched the party’s “reform agenda” which, among several proposals, calls for the reduction in the number of Stormont ministerial departments from 11 to 6.