Opinion

Assembly election offers left-leaning voters real choice

People Before Profit candidate Gerry Carroll is standing for election in west Belfast
People Before Profit candidate Gerry Carroll is standing for election in west Belfast People Before Profit candidate Gerry Carroll is standing for election in west Belfast

You may view a Stormont election as pointless, and still notice with interest the variety of hopefuls competing for a place in it - even before the emergence of something like an SDLP splinter.

The multiplication of labels adds pepper to an over-familiar stew, plus the spice of mystery. Who could want to spend time somewhere so insistent, against the evidence, on its own importance? It seems that 276 do, though 168 of them will escape by missing a seat.

For a few, fighting on platforms well clear of the mainstream, the unlikeliness of winning almost vanished last time out. People Before Profit might get jeers from Sinn Féin and SDLP canvassers about being pie in the sky, too good for this world. But Gerry Carroll in West Belfast and Eamonn McCann in Foyle came close enough to seats to create a lasting mirage of McCann making fun of Martin McGuinness across the assembly floor.

How could he or young Carroll stand the boredom? Reporters shovelling through debates would love to see either arrive, dependent as they have largely been on the rasp of Jim Allister to disturb the drone of party blocs. The very notion of a left-winger or more than one arriving to unsettle controlled surfaces! Because unsettling it would be. The issues of abortion and same sex marriage won’t disappear. Conservatives aren’t the only ones with consciences. Backbenchers unhappy at being required to stay silent might find it even harder to stay in line if newcomers voiced their suppressed beliefs, and voiced them well.

Out in the field, rubbishing the pretensions of Sinn Féin to anti-establishment attitudes is by this stage hardly necessary. Raking in expenses through non-functioning ‘cultural’ bodies without the least comeback is about as establishment as it gets. Then there’s the benefit business. For every voter who will support Sinn Féin no matter what their representatives have stood over in the past five years, there must be another who didn’t and doesn’t buy the fast talk about winning protection for the poorest, holding out against austerity.

The assorted left are rallying round threatened day care centres, on picket lines demanding a living wage. Also ready, no doubt, to reap disgust at Martin McGuinness in that UTV debate championing lower corporate tax. Or the sound of Arlene Foster complaining that the pro-choice platform effectively ‘disrespects’ those like her - and McGuinness - who want state provision of abortion to stay limited to content their most conservative followers.

A hard-edged Green campaign, the SDLP outflow, assorted leftists including two strands of Labour as well as PBP – in addition to the traditional unionist crop of independents on top of Allister’s TUV and UKIP – it all adds up to a spread that could cost the bigger parties a seat or more. Not enough to change the balance, nothing like the mash-up the Republic’s electorate enforced with their vote last month; but signs of change, all the same, particularly in the midst of near-despair about the lack of abortion provision.

It would be daft to see this as a rising tide of unified protest. The various leftist groups are exactly that, various, their differences almost certainly enough to keep them from agreeing any electoral pact. But they share a sense of outrage. What they agree on is the need to challenge something presented as a near-consensus: that there is no point asking for legal provision of abortion because conservatism shared across political and sectarian divides will not have it, won’t even contemplate it.

The three very young people, (aged 18, 19 and 24) running as the ‘Labour Alternative’ in East and South Belfast and East Antrim put ‘Right to Choose’ bluntly on their posters. Brisk, clear – and possessed of the teen spirit that stretches parents while it energises friends, their suggestion of “Cross-Community Labour Alternative” as a title to create unity has a wide-eyed if not cock-eyed optimism.

But then the PBP’s Carroll for one takes a similar stance on abortion provision, noting how careful party leaders in last week’s UTV debate were to make clear their ‘pro-life’ credentials while laying claim to compassion.

Then there’s the Northern Ireland Labour Representation Committee, last in the field. Hobbled by their own central office then offered a shared platform by teenagers, what a fate. They still managed to produce eight candidates. The left and liberal-inclined who moan each election about having nobody to vote for need make no more moan. In every constituency this May 5 there are real choices.