David Burnside

David Burnside
Member of the Legislative Assembly
for South Antrim
In office
26 November 2003 – 1 June 2009
Preceded byDuncan Shipley-Dalton
Succeeded byDanny Kinahan
Member of Parliament
for South Antrim
In office
7 June 2001 – 11 April 2005
Preceded byWilliam McCrea
Succeeded byWilliam McCrea
Majority1,011 (2.3%)
Personal details
Born
David Wilson Boyd Burnside

(1951-08-24) 24 August 1951 (age 73)
Ballymoney, Northern Ireland
NationalityBritish
Political partyUlster Unionist Party
Children2
Alma materQueen's University Belfast
ProfessionBusinessman
Military service
AllegianceUnited Kingdom United Kingdom
Branch/serviceBritish Army
UnitUlster Defence Regiment

David Wilson Boyd Burnside (born 24 August 1951) is an Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) politician, who was the Member of Parliament (MP) for South Antrim from 2001 to 2005.

Burnside was also a Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly (MLA) for South Antrim from 2003 to 2009.

In the 1970s Burnside served as Press Officer for the Vanguard Progressive Unionist Party, and he unsuccessfully contested North Antrim for the party at the 1973 Northern Ireland Assembly election.[1] After the collapse of Vanguard he joined the Ulster Unionist Party, standing unsuccessfully in the 1982 Northern Ireland Assembly but then took a back seat from politics for many years while working as a prominent public relations consultant based in London which led him to set up his own PR company.[2][3] He also served in the Ulster Defence Regiment.[4]

Since 2015 he has been a member of the Steering Committee of the Constitution Reform Group (CRG),[5] a cross-party pressure group chaired by Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 7th Marquess of Salisbury, which seeks a new constitutional settlement in the UK. The Constitution Reform Group's Act of Union Bill 2018[6] was introduced as a Private Member's Bill by Lord Lisvane in the House of Lords on 9 October 2018, when it received a formal first reading. The Bill has been described by the BBC as "one to watch" [7] in the current Parliament.

  1. ^ [1] Archived 2 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ "North Antrim 1973-82". ark.ac.uk.
  3. ^ [2][permanent dead link]
  4. ^ David Burnside Profile BBC Politics
  5. ^ "Steering Committee".
  6. ^ "Act of Union Bill [HL] - Parliamentary Bills - UK Parliament". bills.parliament.uk. Archived from the original on 11 May 2021. Retrieved 11 May 2021.
  7. ^ "General election 2019: Ten lesser-known MPs to keep an eye on". BBC News. 15 December 2019 – via bbc.co.uk.