Speech
– North Down Conservatives – 28th November2019
By
John Strafford
Ladies and Gentlemen –
Good evening!
Friends
Conservative friends
Conservative friends of
Northern Ireland
It is a great pleasure to
be here and to support Mathew Robinson as your Conservative candidate in the
General Election and I look forward to seeing him as the first of many
Conservative MPs from Northern Ireland to sit in the House of Commons.
I have met Mathew before
and I can tell you he is a great Conservative and a great believer in democracy
including within the Conservative Party.
Of course, I have been to
Northern Ireland before and each time when I arrive at Belfast International
Airport and start to descend the steps from the plane, there on the ground
before me I see a great big mat and on that mat are written the words: Welcome,
Welcome home!
For that is how I
feel. For many, many, years you have
shown me friendship, kindness, hospitality.
There is nowhere in the United Kingdom, except perhaps Sheffield in
Yorkshire, where I was born, that has a bigger heart.
30 years ago, doesn’t
time fly; at the Conservative Party conference a motion was passed to let the
people of Northern Ireland be members of the Conservative Party. Sadly, many of those who worked so hard to
bring that about are no longer with us, but I can still see their happy faces
when that motion was passed. Happily,
some of you are here today to remember that wonderful occasion.
Let me for a few moments
indulge in a bit of nostalgia to explain to those who were not there what
happened.
In April 1988 I was the
Chairman of the Beaconsfield Constituency Conservative Association, one of the
strongest associations in the country.
It had 6,500 members and raised lots of money for the Party.
Out of the blue I
received a letter from a lady in Northern Ireland writing on behalf of the
“Tories for Equal Citizenship”. In the
letter she put the following question:
Why is it that although I
am a citizen of the United Kingdom I cannot join and be a member of the
political party which forms the government of the United Kingdom? At the time I didn’t know that, so I took
the question to the Executive Council of the Beaconsfield Association and asked
them. They didn’t know either, but went
on to say “write to the Party Chairman, who at the time was Peter Brooke, and
ask him. So I did. His reply was not very satisfactory. He said it was all historical and the Ulster
Unionists had been part of the Party but had left and it was all very
difficult!
I began to get more and
more involved with the North Down Model Conservative Association, and at the
1988 Party conference a petition was organised and got over 1200 signatures and
there was a packed out fringe meeting.
In 1988 the Conservative
Party launched a national membership drive and the last session of the
conference was on Party organisation so I put my name in to speak. I was the last speaker in the session and
having spoken about what we had done in Beaconsfield about membership I then
went on to say “There is other way in which we can increase the membership of
the Conservative Party and that is to allow the people of Northern Ireland to
be members of it.” That got a big
cheer. The lovely Teresa Gorman, do you
remember Teresa, said to me “you have changed the course of history”. Nothing like a bit of flattery to get the
adrenalin flowing!
Lawrence Kennedy and
others were watching the conference in a TV rental shop, because they were not
allowed into the Conference centre and immediately found me and asked if I
would come to Northern Ireland and address a meeting. I said “when?” He said “next Friday”. “OK” I said, and so I came to Northern
Ireland for the first time. I was
expecting a meeting with perhaps a dozen people. No, the hall was packed out. I had never seen so much enthusiasm from
people wanting to join the Conservative Party.
I was given a standing ovation.
A report of the meeting
went to Ian Gow MP, a great man who promptly wrote to Pater Brooke and
described the meeting and told Peter Brooke that he now had to take
action. I was given a copy of the
letter.
The next month I got the
National Union Executive Committee, which I sat on, to support a motion to
affiliate the North Down Conservatives to the Conservative Party and I then
went on to get a similar motion agreed by the Wessex Area Regional Council.
It was therefore a big
disappointment when in November 1988 the National Union announced the rejection
of the application.
What now I thought? Maybe the answer was to alter the
Constitution of the Conservative Party.
Big shock – the Conservative Party did not have a Constitution. The
Party was not a legal entity! At that
time the Conservative Party consisted of three separate entities; they were the
Leader’s Office, the Parliamentary Party and the Voluntary Party which was the
National Union of Conservative Associations.
Now fortunately the National Union did have a Constitution and in that
Constitution it spoke about England and Wales so I put down a motion to alter
the Constitution by inserting “and Northern Ireland” everywhere after “England
and Wales” and tabled it for the Central Council meeting of the National Union
in Scarborough in March 1989.
That really caused
consternation in CCHQ. Their first
reaction was that I couldn’t do that, but I showed them that it was my right to
do it.
Next I received an
invitation to dinner with Sir Peter Lane, later Lord Lane, who was the Chairman
of the National Union and Peter Brooke, the Party Chairman at Peter Lane’s home
in Woking.
It was a very enjoyable
dinner. Peter Brooke was concerned that
my motion would dominate the Agenda and detract from the media coverage they
hoped to get for the elections to the European Parliament which were coming up. I agreed that I would drop the motion if
they undertook to have a motion at the Party Conference in October and would
publicly announce this at the Central Council meeting. They agreed and they stuck to their
word. I was delighted because now I was
convinced that it would pass at the Party conference. It did!
So, ladies and gentlemen
that is briefly what happened. I have
not been able to include in this summary details of all the help that was given
by people like Myrtle Boal, Lawrence Kennedy, James O’Fee, Barbara Finney, Paul McGarritty and many
many others, the media coverage by the Telegraph, the Spectator whose editor
was Charles Moore and Deputy Editor Simon Heffer; or the bomb threat I received
at my house in Gerrards Cross which meant I had protection by the Royal
Protection Squad based in Windsor for a couple of years; or the fact that this
led to the Conservative Party getting a Constitution in 1998.
Let me just briefly
comment on what happened after this and then I will sit down and take
questions.
Lawrence Kennedy fought
the General Election in North down in 1992 and came within 4,000 votes of
winning it. The Conservatives in
Northern Ireland got virtually no help or assistance from Conservative Central
Office. It was only later that we found
out the reason for this. The
Conservative government were in negotiation with the IRA and the Dublin
government to try and reach a peace agreement and the Dublin government were
putting huge pressure on John Major not to give any support to the
Conservatives in order not to jeopardise this.
That situation continued throughout the nineties. Then in 1997 we got Tony Blair and
eventually the Good Friday Agreement.
My view is that the
people grasped at the Good Friday Agreement because it offered a reduction in
the violence in Northern Ireland and it did.
However, I said at the time it was fundamentally flawed. It had a democratic fault line running right
through it.
Democracy is a system of
government in which the people exercise power through their representatives by
a process in which the will of the majority is determined. In a democratic society the majority will
take into account the views of the minority when exercising their will and so
govern for all the people. What it
cannot do is give a minority a veto on the will of the majority. This is where the Good Friday agreement fell
down and what we see today at Stormont is the result.
Today, politics is in
turmoil. We are taking back power from
an undemocratic European Union; a body where legislation is put forward by an
unelected, unaccountable European Commission, a parliament where you can only
vote for a party and not an individual to represent you, a Council of Minister
which meets in secret, a system of voting where a vote in Luxembourg is worth
four times a vote in the United Kingdom because the constituencies do not have
a vote of equal value.
The road to democracy has
been hard fought and tough. From the
Levellers of the 1640s to the Chartists to the riots in 1832 when the great
Reform Act was passed the going has been hard and there was no greater
suffering than when the suffragettes were fighting for votes for women.
Today the baton of
freedom and democracy has been passed to a new generation. I know you will carry that baton with all the
fervour and enthusiasm our predecessors have done. Let us now ride this rainbow of opportunity
and grab that pot of gold containing those precious stones. Freedom, Democracy,
Liberty and Justice.
So my message to the people
of Northern Ireland is:
You may say I am a
dreamer
But I am not the only one
I hope someday you’ll
join us
And the world will live
as one
That is why we have to
win this General Election on December 12, because when we do we will take our
nation back and begin to build once again a great nation for the future and the
World will be our oyster. Vote
Conservative and we will give you back your country.
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