With Stormont’s toytown assembly on holiday, apart from special recall, it’s an opportunity to have a closer look at the parties over the coming weeks.
Today it’s the turn of the two smallest, Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) and People Before Profit (PBP). They each have one MLA: PBP’s Gerry Carroll and TUV’s Timothy Gaston, co-opted to replace the party’s newly-elected MP, Jim Allister.
On the face of it the two parties couldn’t be more different, but there are more similarities than you’d imagine.
People Before Profit is a Trotskyist party on the far left, while TUV is on the far right. Both would deny those shorthand descriptions.
PBP rejects the Trot label and claims to be an ‘eco-socialist’ party, but when you examine what eco-socialism stands for – don’t worry, there won’t be an examination – it’s just Trotskyism with green politics stirred in.
Trotskyist parties never admit they’re Trots, always preferring flags of convenience, but if it waddles like a duck…
The TUV denies being extremist or far right, but when you tie yourself to Nigel Farage’s Reform with its racist tropes, conspiracy theories, dog whistles, support for Donald Trump etc, there’s only one conclusion possible.
There are other considerable differences. PBP is part of an all-Ireland movement with (tenuous) international links. They have TDs in the Dáil and councillors in Dublin.
Numbers vary because like all far-left parties, they’re prone to internecine splits and ideological wrangling as members leave and regroup. Indeed you’d need a PhD in semantics and rhetoric to distinguish between the various splinters.
However, so far in the north PBP has stayed in one piece, sort of. The two main successful figures have been veteran Trot Eamonn McCann in Derry and Gerry Carroll in Belfast.
Although Carroll designates as ‘socialist’ in the assembly and therefore sits as ‘other’, PBP advocates a 32-county socialist Ireland.
On the other hand, as a vintage unionist party, the TUV, if it espouses a world view, keeps it well hidden. Instead, the TUV obsesses over threats to the union, mostly imaginary.
Any manifestation of Irishness – flag, emblems, language, GAA – is anathema. For them the north is exclusively British.
Their original animosity, or rather Jim Allister’s, was towards the DUP for sharing power with Sinn Féin in 2007. That drove Allister to leave the DUP and set up his own party.
Unlike PBP with some pretensions to a world view, the TUV is a mirror in which Allister can admire his own reflection. The picky pettiness and obsessive nature of TUV press releases reveal both the narrowness, nostalgia and backwardness of its members’ outlook.
Although the TUV did well in last month’s general election, the absence of Allister at Stormont will leave a hole. As a one-man band at Westminster he’ll find it difficult to be heard, while his sub at Stormont does not possess his forensic ability to skewer ministers.
Nevertheless, Allister can be satisfied with his TUV’s performance in July, coming in with 48,000 votes and a 6% vote share as well as doing considerable damage to the DUP.
On that scale PBP is in the ha’penny place with its usual 1% share and 8,000 votes from niche areas of a couple of constituencies.
What the parties have in common is the fact that both are exercises in futility, relying on one figurehead to promote their positions, and therefore in the north’s politics neither amounts to a row of beans.
Over almost 20 years neither has been able to add substantially to support. The simple reason for that lack of support is that both parties are a blast from the past.
Trotskyists, who fondly believe Trotskyism has never been done properly, don’t realise Trotskyism only has a past: it all ended in 1989.
It’s the same for the TUV: their unionist world ended in 1972.
As Peter Robinson put it so accurately and cruelly, Allister is the Hiroo Onoda (the last Japanese soldier to surrender) of unionist politics.
Both parties are exercises in futility, relying on one figurehead to promote their positions, and therefore in the north’s politics neither amounts to a row of beans