Northern Ireland has been failed by “invisible, ineffective and absent MPs” and only electing Ulster Unionists can change that, its party leader has said.
Doug Beattie was speaking at the launch of the party’s manifesto for the UK general election on 4 July.
It includes pledges to defend Northern Ireland’s place within the union and work to reduce corporation tax to 15%.
The party is running candidates in 17 constituencies and has said it is in the “hunt” for at least four of those seats.
The Ulster Unionists previously dominated at Westminster, but now holds no seats in Parliament.
It won two seats in 2015, but lost them two years later to Sinn Féin and the DUP.
This is Mr Beattie’s first Westminster election as UUP leader, having taken over the party in 2021.
Speaking on Wednesday, he said his party had the ideas and the people to provide full representation for people in Northern Ireland.
“We haven’t enthused people in Great Britain, we will set about changing that to make people interested in what’s happening in this part of the UK,” he added.
Mr Beattie said other parties were now seeing the electoral threat the UUP is and he insisted there would be at least one Ulster Unionist MP on the green benches in the Commons after the election.
But he said “failure is not fatal” and that he is proud of all the party’s candidates for running, even if it does not lead to great success on 5 July.
He also said he did not understand the policy of abstentionism taken by Sinn Féin, whose MPs do not take their seats in Westminster.
“I accept it’s there, I accept people vote for Sinn Féin because of that, but the reality is the vast majority still want to have somebody at Westminster but they aren’t represented,” he said.
Some of the party’s pledges in this campaign include:
- Defending and promoting Northern Ireland’s place within the union
- Aiming to reduce corporation tax to 15%
- Maintaining pay parity across the health service
- Enhancing direct payments to farmers
- Delivering 7,500 police officers
