A new leader will do little for the SDLP unless it adopts a new approach to politics. For 20 years it has failed to realise that if you keep doing the same thing, while getting an increasingly worse result, perhaps you should try something different.
A new leader is not different. It just means a different somebody doing the same old thing and getting the same result.
The party has a choice: die or change. By refusing to change, it has so far opted for death and, in fairness, it is making good progress in that direction.
The initial soundings from leader-elect Claire Hanna suggests more of the same. She offers a “compelling message of optimism and clarity of purpose”, while working harder “to resonate with people”.
In 2004, Mark Durkan promised “determination to renew, rebuild and regain”, by “rising to the challenge of change”. In 2010, Margaret Richie looked forward “with hope, optimism and creativity” because, she said, “the work of the SDLP is a noble calling”. (That made party membership sound like a religious vocation. It may be coming close to that these days.)
Alasdair McDonnell promised in 2014 that he would continue “rebuilding the party and renewing the party”. In 2018 Colm Eastwood claimed “We are up for the challenge of changing”, which is what Mark Durkan had said 14 years earlier.
Welcome to another Groundhog Day in the SDLP.
So why is the party dying? There are three main reasons.
The first is that while successive leaders must accept some responsibility for electoral decline, the Good Friday Agreement’s political arrangements for Stormont are heavily stacked against the party.
The agreement’s weird solution to sectarian war was to replace it with sectarian politics, rather than try to build the non-sectarian middle ground. It followed that the two most sectarian parties would inevitably be the most successful.
Within 10 years, the SDLP and the UUP were ousted by Sinn Féin and DUP.
While it is sometimes accused of bringing Sinn Féin into politics at its own expense, the SDLP’s real mistake was to create a political environment in which it could not possibly survive. In the Good Friday Agreement, it unwittingly signed its own death warrant.
The second reason for the party’s decline is that its entire political wardrobe was stolen by Sinn Féin, which now struts about in the SDLP’s constitutional nationalist clothing as if it owns the north. (In view of its wealth, it might well do.)
Instead of buying a different political outfit, the SDLP tried to compete in the nationalist fashion stakes. It could have out-manoeuvred Sinn Féin by moving to the left or the centre. It did neither. Alliance now holds the centre and the SDLP in Westminster sits with Keir Starmer’s government, which is effectively Thatcherite.
The third reason is that there does not appear to have been sufficient internal honesty or rigour in explaining the party’s decline. Instead it doggedly denied its slow death, enshrining that denial as a core political belief, tinged with a not-so-subtle hint of self-righteousness.
For 20 years it has claimed that it is a political volcano about to erupt in an outpouring of wisdom, rationality and logic, which will blanket the land in political salvation and sanity. Sadly, all of this has been delusional.
The party is dying because it has been led by managers rather than leaders. (A manager does things right. A leader does the right things.) An SDLP leader would tell the party that unless it changes, it will die.
A leader would stop trying to compete with Sinn Féin on Sinn Féin’s terms and would expand the party’s opposition inside the Assembly to include an outside opposition campaign against a cynical and self-serving Stormont. How about a “Stop the Stormont rot” campaign with pickets, protest marches and lobbying in London, Dublin and Washington?
An SDLP leader would capitalise on Sinn Féin’s and the DUP’s collapse of our public services.
If the UUP also opts for leadership, it could join in what would be a new civil rights campaign against the same old maladministration at Stormont.
On the other hand, an SDLP manager would just talk the same old talk of being ready for the challenge, a new dynamism and all that.
Claire Hanna’s acceptance speech on taking control of the party will indicate whether she will be a manager (“sense of optimism”) or a leader (“we must do things differently”).
The outcome will be more than a matter of words. It will determine whether the party live or dies.
