William Ross (Unionist politician)
William Ross is an Ulster loyalist politician from Northern Ireland. He served as the Ulster Unionist Party Member of Parliament for Londonderry from February 1974 until 2001. He was one of the UUP members opposed to the Good Friday Agreement.
For some years he was a member of the Conservative Monday Club. In September 1982 he was chairman of the Club's Northern Ireland Committee when it published a Policy Paper entitled Proposals for a Constitutional Settlement .
As Chief Whip of the Ulster Unionist Parliamentary Party from 1987 to 1995, in an attempt to derail multi-party talks initiated by Peter Brooke, in February 1990 Ross unsuccessfully introduced a Private Member's Bill, the Northern Ireland Act 1974 Bill, to provide that laws for Northern Ireland may not be made by Orders-in-Council but by Bill introduced into the United Kingdom Parliament, and repeatedly called on the then Conservative Government to implement its 1979 Conservative General Election Manifesto commitment to "establish one or more elected regional councils with a wide range of powers over local services", which had been drafted by the then UUP Leader Jim Molyneaux and adopted by the late Airey Neave in 1978.
Following Jim Molyneaux's retirement as UUP Leader, Ross unsuccessfully stood for the leadership of the Ulster Unionist Party in September 1995 and, although a close confidant and supporter of Molyneaux throughout the latter's leadership of the UUP, quickly became a very vocal opponent of the policies and style of newly-elected UUP Leader David Trimble.
In June 2008, it was announced that he had been made the party president of Traditional Unionist Voice.
William Ross stood for the TUV in the 2010 UK General Election in the East Londonderry Constituency.
