After a period away from regular blogging of the style I don't like putting on Slugger, I'm glad to now be contributing to Everything Ulster. I'm looking forward to getting back into the habit of regular blogging.

When I met up with Beano, we were chatting about a few things, and the conversation came around to the common habit of utterly misrepresented Sir James Craig on one specific matter. I have to say I'm not his biggest fan, indeed I think that he caused a lot of the problems Unionism was subsequently to have, but his decision in 1922 to abolish PR for Stormont Elections from the 1929 election was not one that was intended to screw the nationalists as it is commonly believed, and commonly reported. (Graham Walker's history of the UUP gives a little detail on pages 56, 57 and 71). Indeed this details that the combined Nationalist seat tally dropped by a total of one seat, a situation that largely prevailed in subsequent years. As Nick Whyte details here, the loss of a seat to Nationalism wasn't expected, and was a miscalculation on the part of the draftsmen rather than malicious intent. Local Government is another matter, which I may well return to later in the week, but at Stormont, there was no gerrymandering, and no attempt to reduce the size of the Nationalist caucus.

The simple fact is, the only reason there wasn't an effective opposition at Stormont, was the Nationalists refused to provide one.