Smyth's appointment as head of the Orange Order was seen at the time as a working-class revolt against its middle-class leadership.[citation needed] In the 1970s,he was prominent in the Vanguard movement,a faction within the UUP. However,when it split from the UUP to form the Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party,Smyth chose to remain with the UUP. In 1975,he was elected to the Constitutional Convention for Belfast South,polling more than double the electoral quota.[4]
Member of Parliament
Smyth was selected to fill the vacancy caused by the murder of Robert Bradford,MP for South Belfast. In the 1982 by-election,he received over 17,000 votes and was returned.[4] Later the same year,he was elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly,again polling double the electoral quota.[4] He,along with all other Unionist MPs,resigned his seat in 1985 in protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement and successfully defended the seat in the subsequent by election.[5] In his paper "A Federated People" (published by the Joint Unionist Working Party in 1987),Smyth proposed a federal United Kingdom with the state governments of England,Scotland,Wales and Northern Ireland. Each would be autonomous and,most significantly,fully independent from the federal parliament and government of the United Kingdom at Westminster.
Smyth was on the parliamentary advisory board of Western Goals (UK),which held a well-attended fringe meeting at the Conservative Party conference in October 1988 on the subject of "International Terrorism –how the West can fight back". He was one of numerous high-profile speakers including General Sir Walter Walker,Andrew Hunter MP,Sir Alfred Sherman and Harvey Ward.[6] Hunter and Ward both gave considerable detail to the meeting concerning top-level links between the IRA and ANC.[7]
Having won first place in the ballot for Private Members' Bills,Smyth successfully introduced the Disabled Persons (Northern Ireland) Bill to afford disabled people in Northern Ireland analogous rights for disabled people elsewhere in the UK as provided for in the Disabled Persons (Services,Consultation and Representation) Act 1986. Smyth's Bill received Royal Assent in 1989.
In January 2005,Smyth announced he would be stepping down from Westminster at the next election to spend more time with his wife. He ended his House of Commons career in May 2005. During the election Smyth courted controversy when he and former Ulster Unionist leader Molyneaux appeared in a photograph with Democratic Unionist Party candidate Jimmy Spratt on Spratt's election literature.[14] Smyth denied endorsing Spratt stating:
People take pictures of me and they turn up in different places. I didn't sign any form, I didn't go out canvassing, but I was out canvassing with the only two unionist candidates who asked me.[15]
1 2 Kerr, Michael David Trimble and the 2005 General election, Dublin (2005) pg 58
↑ Kerr, Michael (December 2005). Transforming Unionism: David Trimble and the 2005 General election. Irish Academic Press. p.58. ISBN978-0-7165-3389-4.
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