Opinion

Alex Kane: To find a way back, the SDLP need to work out what has gone wrong since 1998

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.

SDLP leader Colum Eastwood. Picture by Hugh Russell
SDLP leader Colum Eastwood. Picture by Hugh Russell SDLP leader Colum Eastwood. Picture by Hugh Russell

In the first election to the new Assembly in June 1998 the SDLP recorded their second largest vote (177,963) since they were founded in 1970.

Crucially, though, they became the first non-unionist party to top a Northern Ireland-wide poll since 1921. In political/electoral terms it looked like John Hume's crowning glory; indeed, at the European election a year later he polled 190,731, still the largest ever vote for the SDLP.

20 years later and the SDLP has no MPs, no MEP, about half of the vote they had (it's down to an average of 95,000) and down from 24 MLAs to 12 (with the likelihood of further losses). They're also on their fifth leader since 1998. So it's no wonder that there are internal tensions and assorted conversations about their future.

An SDLP MLA told me that the talks with Fianna Fáil "will only lead to division." Maybe so, but it's also true that the talks themselves are just another manifestation of pre-existing, very deep divisions. The same MLA told me, "Colum got it wrong on the abortion stuff and he's getting it wrong again on this merger stuff. He's just as plod-footed as Alasdair (McDonnell)." Ouch!

Back in 1970 the new SDLP absorbed the bulk of the vote that had once gone to the Nationalist Party; a party that was regarded as increasingly irrelevant and ineffective by a new generation of nationalists. That base wanted new voices and smarter strategies, along with evidence that the issues that mattered most to them at that point (which tended to be socio/economic and civil rights rather than the constitutional question) were being recognised and promoted. What was to become the leadership of the SDLP - Hume, Currie, Mallon, Devlin, Fitt - spotted the gap in the electoral market and filled it. The SDLP is now in real danger of becoming the Nationalist Party.

Is there a way back? That depends on working out what went wrong after 1998. It is clear that the British and Irish governments, having decided that it was important to get the DUP and SF into top-dog positions, made the deliberate decision to shaft both the UUP and SDLP. They had served their purpose. The only show in town from around 2002 onwards was nudging Paisley/Robinson and Adam/McGuinness closer together: and if that meant letting them cut what was, to all intents and purposes, a new deal built entirely around their own, mutually contradictory, self-serving electoral/political interests - then so be it.

But allowing the DUP and SF to do that meant a huge problem for the UUP and SDLP. If everything was coming down to a permanent numbers game rather than genuine power-sharing and policy cooperation it left little space for the smaller parties to get traction (which is, of course, precisely what the DUP and SF were counting on). And that, in turn, meant that the UUP and SDLP opted for navel gazing and blame ("we did the heavy lifting"; "we put country before party"; "the two big parties only care about themselves" etc) rather than serious, brutal analysis of the predicament they found themselves in.

Rebuilding your voter base requires a number of things: reassuring and holding-on to the voters you had at the last election; winning back former voters who either went to another party or just stayed at home; attracting first time voters or voters who haven't actually voted for 20-plus years; having a range of policies and positions which can somehow reach out to all of those bases, yet doesn't scare them off. Winning young voters, for example, means nothing if you are losing your traditional base.

But none of this can be done if you don't fully recognise the nature and scale of your problem. Colum, Nichola, Claire, Daniel and Mark are all likeable, well-meaning people and politicians, yet their party is falling apart around them. Is that their fault? Is it the fault of the policies they endorse? Are they just being outsmarted by SF counterparts who seem to have a better understanding of what nationalists/republicans want? Did St Andrews just stack the odds too heavily against them? Maybe they need to look at the Nationalist Party in the late 1960s and ask why/how the new SDLP stepped in and replaced them.

Talking to Fianna Fáil made sense. If Irish unity and a potential border poll are so high on the agenda then the only way the SDLP can match SF's all-Ireland machine is to have one of their own. And that, I think, should have been the primary basis for the talks. Bank agreement on that and then move on incrementally. That moment may have gone, thanks to last week's dog's dinner fiasco with Sorcha McAnespy; and it is now clear that elements within both parties are determined to undermine and destroy the project. Whatever the outcome, they can now expect further division, fewer elected members and less voters.