Memo to Red Ed

By AM Tuesday, October 8, 2013

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Dr John Coulter with his Ireland Eye column which initially featured in the British Labour Party's Tribune Magazine, September 2013 conference edition.

Memo to Red Ed: please, Please, PLEASE contest elections in Northern Ireland because the Centre is split, the Right is in disarray and Labour has the chance to score remarkable poll successes.

   
It took generations for Northern Irish-based socialists to convince the British Labour leadership to organise in Ulster.

We were fobbed off with our membership cheques returned and told to join the soft-republican, inappropriately-named Social Democratic and Labour Party. 

For socialists who wanted to establish non-sectarian politics, it was a real kick in the teeth to be advised to join an overtly moderate Catholic party.

The Southern Irish Labour Party – one of the oldest socialist movements on the island and now part of the partnership government in Dublin – has consistently refused to organise in Northern Ireland. 

The most successful attempt at a long-term socialist movement in Ulster, the now defunct Northern Ireland Labour Party, was eventually swallowed up in the 1970s by the developing centrist Alliance Party. 

Other serious attempts by the Left to establish political movements found themselves too closely linked to terrorist groups. These included The Workers’ Party (Official IRA); Irish Republican Socialist Party (INLA); Progressive Unionist Party (UVF and Red Hand Commando); and Ulster Democratic Party, now the Ulster Political Research Group (UDA).

With a series of elections in Ulster in the coming three years, British Labour has been presented with the best opportunity since the start of the new millennium to establish an effective electoral presence in Northern Ireland. 

Ironically, the peace process has had a devastating effect on the loyalist working class. Its traditional voice, the Democratic Unionists have remodelled themselves as a middle class Unionist movement and have been largely accused of shunning the Protestant working class. 

In the nationalist camp, Sinn Fein – the DUP’s partner in the power-sharing Stormont Executive – is facing the same danger. To remain ahead of its main rival, the SDLP, Sinn Fein will have to concentrate on the electorally lucrative Catholic middle class, perhaps at the expense of its traditional working class republican heartlands. 

The Left-leaning Progressive Unionists have seen a resurgence of their support not witnessed since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, but their paramilitary past is making it difficult for the party to attract Labour supporters within the pro-Union middle classes. 

British Labour will also be boosted by the expected dog-fight for the centre ground in Ulster politics, coupled with a fragmented Right-wing. 

The centre battle sees a four-way split between Alliance, the DUP, the Northern Irish Tories, and the new kids on the block – NI21, formed by two former Ulster Unionist Assembly members. 

Alliance, often seen as merely a ‘soft u’ unionist party and dubbed the ‘wine and cheese brigade’ because of its trendy middle class support base, is expected to go into electoral free-fall because of its role in the Union flag debacle at Belfast City Hall. 

Many Alliance politicians relied on transfer votes from mainly Unionist parties to get elected. Those same Unionists are being told by their leaderships to snub Alliance, a move which if implemented would effectively put the party out of business as a serious electoral force. 

The Tories, in trying to present themselves as a ‘hip cool pluralist’ movement wrongly decided to endorse gay marriage. But Northern Ireland has a massive Christian population who are Biblically opposed to gay marriage. 

While in an increasingly secular mainland Britain, the concept of gay marriage may be acceptable and a vote winner with Conservatives, in Northern Ireland gay rights is a vote loser. If the Tories contest the 2014 Euro poll for one of Ulster’s three seats, they will be lucky to save their deposit. 

The NI21 party was spawned from the internal civil war which has been raging in the Ulster Unionist Party since the then UUP leader David Trimble entered the Northern Ireland Assembly. 

Launched with much glitz and media hype, it has yet to be tested at the polls, but is expected to crash and burn and is already written off as merely a ‘two-fingered’ salute to the current UUP leadership. 

The leading unionist party, the DUP led by First Minister Peter Robinson, is having to endure a tremendous backlash from working class Protestants who feel republicans have benefited more from the peace process than unionists. 

Such is the level of concern at a potential electoral backlash against the DUP, that its leadership is even appealing to middle class, pro-Union Catholics – the so-called Castle Catholics – to join the party. 

Such is the disillusionment among working class loyalists at the DUP’s stance, they have formed their own hardline party, the Protestant Coalition; the second time in a decade loyalists have been annoyed by DUP tactics and left to form another party. The first split spawned the Traditional Unionist Voice movement. 

The DUP’s only hope of avoiding a UUP-style meltdown is to lurch to the Hard Right – a move which could put fatal pressure on the partnership with Sinn Fein in the Executive. 

In spite of being heavily battered in polls since 2003, the UUP could rebrand itself as a solid Right-wing Unionist movement under its latest boss Mike Nesbitt, although the Euroskeptic UKIP is lurking on the fringes eyeing one of the three MEP seats up for grabs. 

Much is being said about Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech. Ulster socialists have a dream at this Labour conference – that Ed Miliband will announce the party will fight elections in Northern Ireland.