On August 2, local BBC ran one of its Red Lines podcasts featuring Claire Hanna, MP for South Belfast & Mid-Down.
The BBC thought, as you might imagine, that the biggest takeaway from the podcast was that Hanna said she disagreed so much with Colum Eastwood’s plan to enter a partnership with Fianna Fáil that she had considered leaving the SDLP and forming a new party.
It was very revealing that her revelation turned out to be inconsequential. The real revelation was that no one cared. The story was dead on arrival. That more or less sums up the position of the SDLP. For years the party has been declining but no one cares about its fate. No one in the list of leaders since Hume’s retirement (four, which tells its own story) has been able to arrest that decline.
When Eastwood was planning to throw in his lot with Fianna Fáil the SDLP’s prospects were dire. Having lost Foyle they had no MPs, no one in Europe obviously, and the Stormont assembly was mothballed. Linking up with FF might have supplied some heft, but under Micheál Martin FF was moving away from supporting northern nationalists let alone advocating Irish reunification, and anyway, having its northern proxy party regularly stuffed by Sinn Féin in elections here wasn’t an attractive vision for FF.
In the 2019 general election the SDLP’s position appeared to improve. A massive anti-Brexit protest vote in South Belfast and a rejection of the deeply unpopular Sinn Féin MP in Foyle gave the party two MPs. However, that was deceptive. The party remained a Potemkin party, a façade, a front behind which lay decay and decrepitude, all too apparent in the recent succession of assembly, council and general elections.
In the dire situation before 2019, Eastwood was for once attempting to cut the party’s coat according to its cloth. Alas, since then the party has returned to its delusions of grandeur despite the relentless loss of seats at Stormont and in councils providing evidence to the contrary. Thus, the party stood candidates in all constituencies in July’s general election despite in many places not only having no organisation but no members.
In her BBC interview Hanna admitted the party only campaigned in three constituencies. Why then stand in all 18? To deceive voters to maintain the façade? To maintain their percentage share of the vote in the north? If so, that failed for it fell 3.8%. Instead of playing to what strengths remain, standing everywhere only exposed the SDLP’s chronic weakness and its candidates’ nuisance value. In some places like North Belfast and Fermanagh/South Tyrone their vote was derisory: 1,413 and 2,386 respectively.
After July’s general election the party needs to take stock. It’s three years to the next assembly election. If they continue to act as a Potemkin party masquerading as a main player, denying reality, extinction awaits. Opposition at Stormont will achieve nothing except confirm impotence.
Thrashing around for a big idea to decorate the façade won’t work either. The grandly named New Ireland Commission composed of the great and the good is just paintwork on crumbling plaster. We’re told there are a hundred members on the Commission which after a year has produced a big fat zero because if they were laid end to end they would never reach a conclusion.
Time to accept the party will never ‘bounce back’, accept that Sinn Féin represents 70% of northern nationalists, that it’s a major national party, something northern nationalists like, something the SDLP isn’t, and doesn’t aspire to be. Accept that the two MPs are elected not because they’re SDLP but for specific reasons: in Foyle with unionist support to keep SF out and in South Belfast because Hanna is neither SF nor DUP. Time to find a role commensurate with its size and accept it’s a small party with patchy ageing bourgeois support in niche areas across the north and no USP.
