As DUP’s citadels fall, it pushes for a unionist unity which would only prove disastrous

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/sam-mcbride/as-dups-citadels-fall-it-pushes-for-a-unionist-unity-which-would-only-prove-disastrous/a1112708542.html

Sam McBride
Today at 07:00

What unfolded in the early hours of yesterday morning reinforces what is an insoluble problem for unionism.

Many unionists fantasise about a solution, but the less palatable truth for them is that no coherent solution exists.

Looking at the headline numbers for how unionism, nationalism, and the constitutionally unaligned have performed, the picture appears benign for unionism and unremarkable for nationalism.

Unionists entered the election with eight MPs and still have eight MPs. Nationalists started with nine MPs, and still have nine MPs. Alliance had one, and still has one.

Even looking at the vote totals for the various blocs suggests only marginal movement.

Unionism has barely moved from 43.2% of the vote in 2019 to 43.1% now. Nationalism has risen fractionally from 40.1% to 40.4%.

But while figures can tell dramatic stories, they can also conceal dramatic truth.

Sinn Fein didn’t contest every seat, which means the true nationalist vote would be slightly higher.

But while nationalism as a whole is only incrementally advancing in elections, that vote is increasingly coalescing around Sinn Fein — and that has consequences for previously safe unionist seats.

For Sinn Fein’s Kathleen McGurk to slash Gregory Campbell’s majority in East Londonderry to 179 votes exemplifies how the political earth is shifting. Campbell was defending a majority of 9,607, yet almost lost. At such a rate of decline, it doesn’t take a mathematician to work out what’s likely in the next election, unless something alters radically.

Similarly, Sinn Fein has gorged into SDLP leader Colum Eastwood’s lead in Foyle. The party has also ended the status of North Belfast and Fermanagh-South Tyrone as marginals, taking both by decisive margins.

Boundary changes partly explain that, but something far more fundamental is involved.

After Sinn Fein’s serious southern reversal last month, northern voters have given the party unambiguously good news; they’re happy with the party’s position in Stormont and even those who’ve grumbled about its stance on Gaza or other issues have mostly still backed the party.

Alliance has lost North Down — a seat where it has long been strong — and won in the DUP heartland of Lagan Valley. As recently as seven years ago, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson took nearly 60% of the vote — almost six times the Alliance vote.

A collapse of that magnitude is exceptional, but so are the circumstances.

This newspaper’s front page headline on polling day — ‘Sent for trial…on the eve of election’ — is unprecedented. Based on what we now know, the DUP’s reaction to their leader being charged with rape and other serious sexual offences has been almost flawless.

But that doesn’t mean voters will stick with the party. One senior DUP figure said privately that although voters had been polite, it had been a “huge issue” in what has long been a cockpit constituency for unionism, represented in Parliament by Donaldson and Jim Molyneaux since its creation 40 years ago.

Sorcha Eastwood’s victory is remarkable; she managed to convince a coalition of voters that she was the candidate who could beat the DUP, and in the end, did so comfortably.

Alliance still has strong positions in North Down and East Belfast, as well as having narrowed the gap with Sammy Wilson in East Antrim to just 1,306 votes.

It won’t be unhappy with this. Naomi Long certainly didn’t appear altogether displeased, despite losing in East Belfast. She had appeared unenthusiastic about standing, understandably so when her position of Justice Minister is far more powerful than that of a backbench MP in a Parliament dominated by Labour.

But decline in Alliance’s share of the vote — which is down by 1.8 percentage points — shows that the surge has stalled.

The party believes in devolution, but the next few years could be difficult ones in which it shares responsibility for unpopular Executive decisions and Executive dysfunctionality while the SDLP leads the Stormont Opposition.

Yet a broader perspective is more flattering for Alliance; when Long won East Belfast in 2010, Alliance’s overall vote in Northern Ireland was just 6.3%. Now it is 15%.

The story of the night was three defeats for the DUP. There were only two positives for the party: Carla Lockhart in Upper Bann was the one DUP MP to increase her vote share, while Gavin Robinson widened his lead over Long in East Belfast.

Even that message demonstrates the party’s dilemma: Robinson is a moderate pragmatist who was at the heart of the party’s deal on the Irish Sea border; Lockhart is a more traditional unionist who opposed the deal to the extent that the TUV stood aside in her favour.

How does a DUP leader discern in that a coherent signal from the party’s voters? It is true that Lockhart has a reputation for being a hard-working constituency MP, but Paul Girvan in South Antrim also has years of working for voters yet was swept away by the electorate.

Perhaps the only clear message is that unionism is restive and directionless. It faces two central difficulties: the calibre of some of its representatives, and the policy those politicians adopt.

If you want to understand the DUP’s woes, Gregory Campbell is a good place to start. His rhetoric is full-throated not-an-inch unionism. It’s often delivered in deliberately provocative tones such as his ‘curry my yoghurt’ mockery of Sinn Fein MLAs speaking Irish in Stormont or his grossly distasteful jibe that Sinn Fein’s Raymond McCartney was a “failed hunger striker” (after criticism, he stood over the comment, stating that McCartney had failed because he “didn’t die”).

Yet his actual stances have been quietly accommodationist. He has backed every major DUP compromise, and is the most barbed in his attacks on TUV leader Jim Allister.

Thus he has managed to alienate both moderates and hardliners; moderates can’t see past the boorish behaviour while hardliners believe that he’s a sheep in wolf’s clothing.

Just last weekend, Campbell hubristically dismissed the LucidTalk poll for the Belfast Telegraph, calling it a “Bogustalk” poll which was “nonsense”. The results showed the DUP 10 percentage points down on 2019; in the end, Campbell’s vote was down 12 percentage points.

The DUP has indulged this sort of mindless belligerence, just as it has indulged Ian Paisley Jr’s myriad scandals.

There are plenty of senior DUP figures quietly chuffed at Paisley’s downfall, yet they tolerated his behaviour, despite knowing it was damaging unionism, because they thought he could deliver a seat which would inflate the party’s tally.

Jim Allister’s defeat of Paisley is likely to be the crowning achievement of his career.

For years, he’s been mocked for failing to break through. Now he has done so with an exceptional personal endorsement in the city, towns and laneways which gave birth to the DUP over 50 years ago.

Allister’s victory was defined, in fact, by vintage Paisleyism, it’s just that here the target of the Paisleyism was a Paisley.

When the DUP founder was elected in 1970, he thundered to cheering crowds: “The Unionist Party led by Chichester-Clark has been deceiving and betraying us.”

In this election, Allister put it to voters: “Do you like being lied to… are you going to vote again for those who sought to hoodwink and mislead you on such a fundamental constitutional issue?”

In 1970, the issue was accommodating nationalists within a de facto one-party system; now the issue is the Irish Sea border which even the most obtuse voter can see remains months after the DUP claimed it had been swept away. And yet, Allister’s enforced departure from Stormont removes the DUP’s most troublesome interrogator from the place where he can do the most damage.

In Stormont, he has faced the DUP and Sinn Fein on the floor of the Assembly, in committees, through written questions, and by getting legislation passed.

In Westminster, he’ll be facing Labour. The DUP are minor players and Sinn Fein won’t be there at all. Allister now needs to find someone who can competently keep up at least a significant percentage of his work rate in Stormont if the TUV is not to look back on this as a curse in disguise.

Debate within unionism, inevitably, turned to unionist unity before many of the boxes had even been opened.

Where once that might have been a strategic choice, now it is a desperate last gamble. Every DUP seat now is a marginal, with the exception of Upper Bann. Without unity, it will likely lose even most power.

The range of voices calling for some form of pan-unionist cooperation now straddles both conservative and liberal wings.

Former UUP leader Mike Nesbitt told the BBC that a “realignment” is necessary. He admitted it would be “incredibly messy” but said it was nevertheless “incredibly necessary”.

Having three unionist parties has for years made little sense. But having two parties wouldn’t solve the problem of a split vote. The truth is that the vote there to be split has been relentlessly declining. Many in unionism are in denial about this, believing that if only the parties worked together, things could go back to the way they were 20 or 30 years ago.

Campbell almost snorted on Good Morning Ulster yesterday when asked whether voters were disillusioned with him and whether he needed to engage in some self-reflection: “I got more votes than the other two [unionists] put together. How can you indicate or infer that there’s disillusionment if I got more votes than the other two put together?”

The only sure way for unionism to solidify its support would be through either a single party or single agreed candidates. But this would only bring a temporary reversal of the decline.

Dispensing with intra-unionist competition would ultimately be electorally disastrous. It would look even to many pro-Union voters as crudely sectarian, and would eliminate the healthy competition which forces out politicians who have performed badly. It was decades of this flabbiness which led to the emergence of the DUP, and of the civil rights movement.

Even before that led to decline, the new party’s policies would be either the subject of constant argument, or be so bland as to be meaningless beyond ‘we support the Union’. If that means every election is a pretend border poll, without even an attempt to infuse policies into the debate, it’s hardly an inspiring platform on which to win the votes of the young.

Even some of those from parties backing independent unionist Alex Easton expressed concern at the count over how he will fare as an MP. With no manifesto, limited knowledge of national affairs, and no party structure around him, some of them fear he could be disastrous, yet his blank canvas candidacy where unionism is all that matters is the logic of unionist unity. Some of those advocating unity realise it would be disastrous. They know unionism is declining, but want to eke out what they can from what remains.

The historian Aaron Edwards observed that from the outset of Northern Ireland’s existence, fears of decline were used to prop up the ruling unionist party: “Unionists tied to the governing party were acutely aware of the need to keep their constituents in the constant grip of a fear that their position was being constantly undermined by a range of opponents.”

In that regard, there is nothing new under the sun. But what is new is Sinn Fein’s status as Northern Ireland’s largest party at Westminster.

In the space of four decades, Sinn Fein has gone from what seemed like Bobby Sands’ aberrative breakthrough to a position of dominance. There is still no obvious path to even achieving a referendum on Irish unity, much less winning one, but when it comes to winning elections, it’s a very different story.