The Sam Spade Memorial Good Post Gallery

[Slow Learner]

What a good post!

Took me a lifetime to get through that novel.

[Slow Learner]

Whoever had the best chance of beating Adams, so presumably Hendron.

At the time it was one of those elections where your average voter couldn't really tell who the "best" anti-Sinn Fein candidate was so voting tactically was all but impossible: in the end there were less than 700 votes separating Fitt and Hendron which suggests that there wasn't really a better one to vote for.

What's interesting is that there seems to have been significant anti-Sinn Fein tactical voting in that constituency anyway and it didn't really change much: the combined Unionist vote went down almost 25% from (possibly dodgy, you can never tell) notional 1979 numbers; and in 1987 the UUP (there was a Unionist pact that year so the DUP didn't stand) went up 8% from the combined DUP/UUP vote in 1983 - and that's not including the Alliance vote from 1979, which I assume will have split between the UUP, Hendron and Fitt probably mostly to the latter two.  Its just when you've got two credible non-Sinn Fein candidates who are equally popular the average unionist probably fragmented between the more "moderate" (probably a bad word to use for NI admittedly) party and the person that they knew.  Makes you wonder how much politics would have changed in the province had Fitt not left the SDLP or had they decided not to oppose him in this general election, although probably very little considering that Sinn Fein were abstentionist anyway...

I'd have voted for Fitt; one of the better Northern Irish politicians.  I greatly dislike the fact that he abstained on the Vote of Confidence in 79 but I doubt that much would have changed had he saved the government, I doubt that Labour ever would have won that election, although maybe they might have had Thatcher's majority much smaller to the point where she'd have to have fought with her party to get anything done.  I respect that he moved away from the sectarian politics and just be a Socialist politician, and honestly its a shame that it didn't work...