Politicians pretend to dismiss polls when they dislike their findings. But polls start hares for sure and rarely send the creatures back to the traps.
Alliance’s moment has repeatedly almost arrived, Sinn Féin’s ascension is probably still happening, Ulster Unionism has done rightly out of its current leader and the TUV might lose their bounce back to the DUP, who are in a bad way; all this insight incited by the latest LucidTalk poll for the Belfast Telegraph.
Alliance leader Naomi Long decided some time back, logically enough, to head for a centre ground that flits in and out of sight. If her nerve holds throughout an election campaign, the general tone of which is likely instead to play up the imminence of Sinn Féin topping the electoral poll, the centrist surge could be something to see. It will depend on developments Alliance can neither control or much affect; the state of unionist disintegration, and where the bulk of nationalist opinion fetches up.
And the SDLP, apparently stuck at the bottom? Neither pollsters nor party predicted both those big wins in December 2019 for Colum Eastwood and Claire Hanna. The party may have been befuddled ever since about best use of their super-articulate MPs, but then it has lacked a centre of gravity for a long time. In the first few tweets lately from assembly star performer Matthew O’Toole, SDLP reps champion ending slapping children, childcare, period poverty as well as voting against Belfast City Hall flying a birthday flag for Prince Andrew. Good causes all, and somewhat obvious marketing in multiple directions.
Trying to dissect internal relationships in the DUP seems almost as pointless, and off-putting, as trying to look inside the TUV. The past year told the world more than many wanted to know about DUP dynamics or indeed about DUP/TUV competition for hardline support. Certainly nobody in the TUV had the clout to persuade Jim Allister out of those tributes to Davy Tweed, revised only after repeated angry comment from relatives Tweed had abused. Fellow North Antrim elected unionists Mervyn Storey and Ian Paisley at least repented sooner. What if any effect will that episode have in the next election?
It is probably too much to hope that votes will peel away from the TUV leader because he refused to sign the Stormont letter against double-jobbing. On the grounds that SF signed it. Yet he was happy to stand alongside convicted killer Billy Hutchinson as fellow leader of a unionist party.
But then leading unionists have always failed to equate, or refused to equate, loyalist violence with that of republicans. Doug Beattie also turned out for that pose on Stormont’s steps alongside the PUP’s Hutchinson, a slightly more surprising sight than the presence of Allister or that of Sir Jeffrey. Beattie said little about it later, even less about Kate Hoey/Jamie Bryson’s nightmare of nationalists galloping through the ranks of the law, academia and media in pursuit of a united Ireland. It was Donaldson’s approval of the diagnosis as ‘helpful’ that others thought most damaging. What Beattie thought is not clear.
Still trying to tootle along as 'Mr Nice Guy', off-colour jokes notwithstanding, at the head of a party thought to be unleadable well before the DUP combusted, Beattie picks his way through swampland. Personalities count as much as policies but is he distinct enough to keep Ulster Unionist voters onside? To coax those Garden Centre Protestants, perhaps the bulk of non-voters, to turn out on polling day instead of professing disgust for all politicians? To lure back those who left a while ago for Alliance?
Being poll-friendly has yet to lure Sinn Féin into behaviour that makes the prospect of them as top-dog less off-putting – to Alliance, SDLP and UUP executive ‘colleagues’ if not to voters. No matter how they try republicans cannot rewrite the past.
Ganging up with the DUP to fix agendas is one feature they might fix, for a better future.
