The United Kingdom Unionist Party was never an opponent of peace, but was opposed to the Belfast Agreement as being a flawed and defective means of achieving peace, which was never going to reconcile the communities or end sectarian violence and social crime. It required not only political foresight but moral courage to speak this truth when many did not wish to hear it.
The UKUP believes that devolution, Belfast Agreement style, has been a failure which is only held together by the monies lavished upon the parties willing to try and work it. Without an effective opposition or collective responsibility of its executive, it has totally failed to deliver the benefits to which the people are entitled.
The failure of the pro-agreement parties to negotiate a stable financial basis for devolved government has produced a breakdown in public services. Our water, sewage and transport utilities are at crisis point. Our hospitals have the longest waiting lists in Europe. Law enforcement is seemingly incapable of stemming a rising tide of crime, while terrorists remain fully armed. On the economic front, many of our manufacturing industries, from shipbuilding to textiles, have simply disappeared, while agriculture is in crisis. The agreement's alleged 'peace dividend' is non-existent, but the people now face the threat of vastly increased rates and water charges to pay for what central government failed to do when it was directly responsible. The United Kingdom Unionist Party has been the first to raise these matters in the assembly. We believe that -
- the soaring cost of bureaucracy, including salaries, must be curtailed
- the proposals for rate increases and water charges are a wrong and unfair basis for general taxation
- Westminster should repay the money it saved by permitting essential infrastructure to deteriorate
- the threat to a grammar school system must end. Save the best, improve the rest, must be the only objective
- the destruction of police morale and the restriction of essential recruitment by religious discrimination in the employment of new recruits must cease. The vicious attacks on the elderly and vulnerable must be stopped.
This election will be about the negotiation of a new agreement. Those who negotiated for unionism in 1998 have clearly failed. The United Kingdom Unionist Party, as in the past, will put the welfare of the people above all else and attempt to hold a balance between the self interests of larger and competing parties in the hope of finding a unity of purpose for the entire pro-union people.
