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attract Catholics as members and voters. On the face of it the UUP – free since 2005 of any organic link to the Orange Order – should stand a better chance of Catholic support than the DUP; yet it is one of this book’s key findings that the number of Catholic members remains embarrassingly low, and there has been no evidence of any increase in Catholic votes. Again, the UUP’s fear of losing the support base it still has would appear to have inhibited it from going further towards addressing the concerns of those from a Nationalist background who may be open to a softer Unionism less focused on emotional demonstrations of British identity. However, there might be another explanation for this failure to date. Quite simply, the UUP (or any other Unionist party) has not attempted to make a case for the Union on the pragmatic grounds of the benefits derived from the Welfare State and NHS and the sense in which the UK might still be said to work in a socially progressive way around the ‘pooling and sharing’ of resources. These were the words of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown in a telling intervention in the Scottish Independence Referendum back in 2014. Although the UUP, when in government in Northern Ireland, facilitated the implementation of the post-war Labour government’s ‘New Jerusalem’ programme, the party has always shied away from ‘owning’ this agenda; the right-wing orientation of its membership – detailed in this book – has acted as an impediment to left-of-centre arguments for the Union becoming part of the party discourse. If the UUP has a service still to perform for the cause of the Union, it is perhaps to reach out to those Catholic voters on whom, as demographic trends indicate, the future of the Union in Northern Ireland will increasingly depend. The UUP itself may not get many votes in return but there could be a dividend in any future Irish unity poll. However, this task is rendered extremely hazardous by the recent ‘Brexit’ developments in the UK, a phenomenon that this book’s research unfortunately pre-dated.