Politics
Around this time Barr also became involved in politics by joining the Vanguard Progressive Unionist Party (VPUP) and was elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly, which had been set up under the Sunningdale Agreement, in 1973. As a result Barr was the only UDA member to serve in either of the two bodies elected in Northern Ireland following the collapse of the Stormont Parliament. However according to Ian S. Wood it had been Barr's profile as a trade unionist and community worker, rather than any UDA connections, that had won him the election.
He soon became a leading figure in the opposition to Sunningdale agreement and effectively led the Ulster Workers' Council strike that brought about the collapse of the new power-sharing government. Barr was chairman of the Ulster Loyalist Central Co-ordinating Committee, a group containing Ulster Workers' Council representatives, politicians and paramilitaries that directed the strike. He would later comment that it would have been feasible to establish a provisional government for an independent Northern Ireland from this body.
Always something of a maverick within Unionist politics, Barr served a three month suspension from the United Ulster Unionist Council (UUUC) after endorsing the candidacy of Ken Gibson of the Volunteer Political Party for West Belfast in the October 1974 general election despite the Democratic Unionist Party's John McQuade representing the UUUC. During his suspension Barr was part of a UDA delegation that made a fund-raising trip to Libya where they met with Muammar Gaddafi. Barr claimed when he returned that Gaddafi, who at the time was funding the Provisional IRA, had expressed a firm interest in providing money for an independent Northern Ireland. The trip however, on which Barr was accompanied by Tommy Lyttle and Harry Chicken, was widely condemned by unionist politicians because of the purportedly left-wing nature of the Gaddafi regime whilst the same reason was used a basis by Charles Harding Smith to launch a loyalist feud against UDA leader Andy Tyrie, whose idea the trip had been. In the course of this feud, Harding Smith placed Barr under a death threat, although nothing came of this as the pro-Tyrie forces quickly dispatched the challenge of Harding Smith.
When the VPUP split after leader William Craig suggested in the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention that he would consider a power-sharing arrangement with the Social Democratic and Labour Party Barr was one of the few leading figures to remain loyal to Craig rather than decamping to Ernest Baird's United Ulster Unionist Party. When the UDA intimated that it did not back Craig's position either Barr tendered his resignation from the paramilitary group. Barr, who had exchanged angry words with Ian Paisley on a few occasions when both men were central to the 1974 strike, publicly distanced himself from the attempted strike organised by Paisley's United Unionist Action Council in 1977. Along with David Trimble he became deputy leader of the Vanguard and held this position until the party dissolution in 1978. He, however, did follow Craig in joining the Ulster Unionist Party and instead returned to his UDA roots.
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“The one thing sure about politics is that what goes up comes down and what goes down often comes up.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)