In England, voters used last week’s local elections to express frustration with the two biggest parties, the Conservatives and Labour. Many outgoing councillors felt that they’d lost their seats because their leaders at Westminster failed to deliver on Brexit and other important issues.
In Northern Ireland, where the power-sharing government has not met for nearly eighteen months, the DUP and Sinn Féin were relatively unscathed by voters’ anger. The success of the Alliance Party and the Greens attracted a good deal of attention, but their strong performances did not come at the expense of the larger parties.
The DUP lost a handful of seats, thanks to the vagaries of the single transferable vote system, but it won 24.1 per cent of first preference votes – a 1 per cent improvement on its showing in 2014. Sinn Féin actually won more council seats than previously, though its share of first preference votes fell slightly, by 0.8 per cent to 23.2 per cent.
Alliance, whose vote share rose from 6.7 per cent to 11.5 per cent, is viewed traditionally as a cross-community group that tries to bring together unionists and nationalists. Under its current leader, Naomi Long, though, the party has been keener to emphasise ‘progressive’ policies.
At the moment, Alliance is attractive to members of the affluent middle-classes, who worry that leaving the EU might affect their lifestyles, as well as younger people, who believe that social reforms, like legalising same sex marriage and abortion, are being prevented by the DUP.
Unfortunately, the party has also imported the preachier aspects of modern identity politics and its hostility to Brexit means it backs plans to loosen Northern Ireland’s links with the rest of the UK and tie it more closely to the Republic of Ireland.
That hasn’t prevented Alliance from drawing most of its support from traditionally unionist constituencies, where there is a certain amount of complacency among well-heeled voters about the benefits of the Union and confusion about the constitutional aspects of leaving the EU.
As a consequence the party has gained many of its new votes from areas where the Ulster Unionist party previously performed strongly. In last week’s election, the UUP, which was once the overwhelming force in politics in Northern Ireland, continued its long decline.
The party had a particularly disastrous result in Belfast, where it won only two seats on the city council, down from seven in 2014. One of its successful councillors, Jim Rodgers, a veteran who was formerly lord mayor, has now had the UUP whip withdrawn, as punishment for distributing election literature that accused Alliance of habitually supporting Sinn Féin at city hall.
This controversy neatly encapsulates the party’s dilemma. There are tensions between old style candidates like Rodgers, who fight for votes in unforgiving working class areas in Belfast, or in constituencies where unionism has a more traditional flavour, and representatives who need support from middle class voters who are becoming increasingly liberal and secular. A number of Ulster Unionist candidates claimed that media coverage of this aggressive leaflet cost them their seats.
In its glory days, when it dominated Northern Ireland’s parliament, the UUP was a broad coalition that spanned every variety of unionism. That was its strength, but in more recent times it has become a weakness. Its decline started decades before, but the party finally lost its leadership of unionism after signing up to the Belfast Agreement in 1998 and undergoing relentless attacks from Ian Paisley and the Democratic Unionists.
In the intervening years, the UUP’s leaders have never quite worked out whether to consolidate its position as a more moderate unionist option or compete for hardline voters with the DUP. In the end, they’ve done neither and both.
The party last generated excitement and a sense of purpose when it formed an electoral pact with David Cameron’s Conservatives, under Sir Reg Empey’s leadership. That arrangement, known as UCUNF, performed strongly in the 2009 European Parliamentary poll, but it was undermined by infighting and narrowly failed to win seats at the 2010 general election.
The party’s leader between 2012 and 2017, Mike Nesbitt, tried to forge a cross-community relationship with the SDLP, by forming an official opposition at Stormont to the DUP and Sinn Féin executive. Yet, he also made electoral pacts with the Democratic Unionists and his overtures to the SDLP were met with a lukewarm response. His successor, Robin Swann, has so far been equally unsuccessful in trying to define a clear role for the Ulster Unionists.
Alliance’s growing popularity suggests that unionism in Northern Ireland badly needs some sort of secular, modern advocate to avoid losing younger and more liberal voters. If unionists are content to lend this pro-Union electorate to other parties until a border poll takes place, it will empower an ongoing nationalist campaign to erode the meaning of the province being part of the UK.
With a few notable exceptions, the UUP has spent decades haemorrhaging votes under successive leaders. The party is too old and illustrious to disappear quickly, but unless it can find a strong message and a clear reason to exist, its long slow death will continue.
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