Opinion

Alex Kane: Our competing political identities must work out how to cooperate and integrate

Alex Kane

Alex Kane

Alex Kane is an Irish News columnist and political commentator and a former director of communications for the Ulster Unionist Party.

When you cast a vote you are saying something about who you are, how you see yourself and how you want to be seen
When you cast a vote you are saying something about who you are, how you see yourself and how you want to be seen When you cast a vote you are saying something about who you are, how you see yourself and how you want to be seen

WHEN you go to a polling station, place an X, tick or number beside a name or names on a ballot paper and then put that paper into the ballot box, you are saying something about yourself and your identity.

And it doesn't matter if that polling station is in Belfast, London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Dublin, Paris, Brussels, New York or any other city in the world.

When you cast a vote you are saying something about who you are, how you see yourself and how you want to be seen.

You vote for the party that comes closest to representing and protecting your personal identity or, as is often the case nowadays, the multiplicity of identities many of us have.

Identity politics is the key factor in play in almost every election: even in those countries which don't, unlike Northern Ireland, have a constitutional dispute at the heart of their everyday political debate.

If you're a unionist here then you will most likely vote for a pro-Union party (DUP, UUP, TUV, PUP, Conservative, Ukip etc); and if you're a nationalist you'll most likely vote for a pro-Irish unity party (SF, SDLP etc).

At the last three elections an average of 81 per cent of those who voted did so along very clear 'identity' lines: a slight fall from the 87 per cent who did so in the first Assembly election in 1998.

The remaining 19 per cent, sometimes described as 'other' mostly voted for Alliance and a group of smaller parties.

'Other' is sometimes taken to mean voters outside the traditional orange/green identity, as if they don't actually have an identity.

But they do. Their identity is not being orange or green in Northern Ireland elections; although it isn't always clear how they would vote in a border poll on Irish unity, something which could force them to choose between the UK and a new Ireland.

At that point many of those people could find themselves with, for want of a better term, a John Hewitt identity (Irish. British. European.), yet they would still have to make a choice to prioritise one of those identities.

In June this year the latest Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey suggested that 50 per cent didn't describe themselves as either unionist or nationalist.

Why do so many people who choose not to describe themselves as unionist or nationalist in a survey then choose to vote unionist or nationalist when given the next available opportunity?

The field work for this survey was done before the local government and Euro elections in May, so how do we explain the almost 80 per cent who voted for unionist and nationalist parties in those elections?

Putting that another way, why do so many people who choose not to describe themselves as unionist or nationalist in a survey then choose to vote unionist or nationalist when given the next available opportunity?

Or, yet another way of putting it, why didn't they vote in greater numbers for Alliance and the other smaller parties?

I don't know the answer. Maybe they just voted for the party which comes closest to the identity they have of themselves.

I was at an event a few weeks ago when a unionist politician admitted to being surprised by the number of people he knew who now describe themselves as being from a 'unionist or pro-Union background' rather than simply describing themselves as unionist.

It reminded me of a conversation about a year ago when an SDLP politician mentioned his similar surprise about the number of people he knew who, rather than simply call themselves nationalist, would "dress it up as quite liking the idea of a new Ireland if the time was right".

I wonder if that shift in language tells us something about what might be called the Brexit impact: that willingness to look at an identity of themselves bigger than Irish, British or even 'Northern Irish' - an identity they fear might be lost if the UK leaves the EU.

Over the next few years identity politics will dominate debate across the British Isles: with English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Ulster/Northern Ireland, British, European (and the various subsets of each) all jostling for their voices to be heard and accommodated.

Each of those identities faces huge challenges, not least of which is how they integrate and cooperate rather than isolate and compete.

There is, I think, nothing to fear from this process; a process which had actually begun long before the Brexit debate.