The Alliance Party should not keep sitting on the fence, while washing their hands of responsibility.
It has become too large and too important a player to remove itself from the principal dilemma that the people of the north, indeed the people of the whole of this island face. They can’t just keep washing their hands while the whole political machinery is clogging up.
Unfortunately, it is likely that they will continue to do just that, certainly in the medium term, but they can’t then claim that they have no responsibility for the consequences of their decision. The outcome of that continuous washing will be very clean hands and very corroded politics.
The original and continuing motivation of Alliance is a desire to stand aside from the constitutional issue and to offer an alternative to the binary politics of orange and green. That has always been considered by some to be principled and worthy and by others as naive. It was often the butt of scorn. John Hume’s analysis that you can’t build a bridge from the middle of the river, would have been one of the less cruel put downs.
There is a grittiness at the heart of Alliance and there is a durability and a toughness in its membership. That was there at the beginning, began to waver a little as the years rolled by without much progress in attracting the voters to its analysis but it has reasserted itself in recent times as inept governance by the two big parties has become repetitive. Grittiness is good but without accurate political analysis, it is only a charade.
Part of that accurate analysis is that fifty years after the Alliance Party was founded, the binary politics of orange and green has never been stronger; it has strengthened, not weakened. Fifty years is a long time in politics, especially when the essential purpose of your party is not making any progress but is seen to be in retreat.
Alliance’s response is that they have doubled or trebled their vote from single figures to sixteen or eighteen per cent, and that is impressive. The movement of some voters to Alliance can be seen as political change where everyone can have their choice of orange or green identity but within the status quo. Or it can be seen more realistically as condemning the north to continuous bickering about identity and insuring continuous inept governance.
In the last fifty years there has only been one fundamental change in our political relationships. For the first time ever, there is now no majority political ideology in Northern Ireland. For unionist, nationalist, republican or Northern Ireland identity, there is now no political majority. That existential change is a reason for hope. Unlike the past, no political ideology can lord it over, dominate or ignore other opinions.
We have now entered the era of choice. We have mostly left violence behind and had a few years of semi-consensual politics. Those years did not bring us past or beyond the existential identity question and Brexit and the protocol has intensified and prioritised that question. Our present dilemma is that the only agreed mechanism is for a border poll, which has its place, but which reduces the most complex questions to a simplistic yes or no answer. Worse still, its timing is in the hands of an absentee English politician.
Alliance’s real gift to all the people of this island would be to make engagement, negotiation about future identity, happen. To choose to insist that the engagement and the negotiations take place in an appropriate setting and over an acceptable time scale that allows for all voices be heard and the best accommodations achieved.
Alliance can choose to remain neutral on the outcomes but it would be naive and maybe even cowardly to deny that it has some responsibility and a wonderful opportunity to move us out of the political morass.