Tories distance themselves from comments at Orange rally

THE Scottish Conservatives yesterday moved to distance the party from potentially inflammatory remarks made by a former senior Tory MP at an Orange rally in Glasgow on Saturday.

At a gathering of about 15,000 bands and supporters on Glasgow Green, Andrew Hunter, the independent Conservative MP for Basingstoke and former chairman of the Tory back-bench committee on Northern Ireland, claimed every generation had to "fight and win its own Battle of the Boyne" to ensure that democratic ideals can survive.

He also branded the Northern Ireland peace process a "sordid saga of surrender and appeasement". His remarks came just one day before yesterday’s Orange march to Drumcree, which has been a flashpoint area in the Northern Ireland marching season for almost a decade.

Yesterday’s parade passed largely without incident, but with Orange leaders still refusing to hold face-to-face talks with nationalist residents of Garvaghy Road.

The MP sat on the Northern Ireland affairs committee at Westminster for many years and remains a close personal friend of the former Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith. He also urged those present to resist recent moves by the Scottish Executive to regulate or restrict Orange parades following the appointment of a parades regulator last week.

At the Glasgow gathering, where police made 23 arrests for minor offences, the Hampshire MP said: "The voices of those who would deny or restrict our right to parade publicly, as we have done today, are getting louder each year. And I wish you well in your resistance against that sound and voice and cry of evil."

He added: "Each generation has to fight and win its own Battle of the Boyne to ensure that the liberal democratic ideals which underpin our free society can survive and flourish."

The victory of King William of Orange over the Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 is traditionally celebrated by the Orange Order in Glasgow on the Saturday before the main 12 July celebrations in Northern Ireland.

Mr Hunter is no stranger to controversy due to his views on the province. He left the Conservative Party in 2002, following 19 years of service at Westminster, to join Dr Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, for whom he unsuccessfully contested the Lagan Valley seat for the Northern Ireland Assembly.

The Scottish Conservatives attempted to dissociate themselves yesterday from Mr Hunter’s remarks, emphasising that his views were not representative of the party in Scotland.

A spokesman said: "I don’t think we would want to get involved with him at all, to be perfectly honest.

"If this person is independent, he is not representing the party," said the spokesman. "We have opinions about the need, or not, for march ‘tsars’, but they have nothing to do with any particular march or any particular side.

"Similarly, we have commented on the peace process, but we have nothing to say about the comments of someone who is not a member of the party up here."

Following Mr Hunter’s resignation from Westminster politics in 2002, Mr Duncan Smith, the then Tory party leader, thanked him for almost 20 years of service and said that he would always be regarded as a friend of the party and a personal friend of his.