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“Unionists were too stupid to realise they had won and republicans were too clever to admit they had lost”.
That was the infamous verdict on the Belfast Agreement by Prof Paul Bew, the historian and adviser to David Trimble.
There is a sense of this around the UK’s incoming Labour government, which will be taking office on Friday, unless the British polling industry has gone even further awry than its Irish counterparts.
Unionists should be dancing in the streets, with relief as much as celebration.
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Labour will pursue a softer Brexit, lowering the sea border if it succeeds. If it fails, Brexit’s presumed direction of travel will still be reversed in unionism’s favour.
Labour provokes less antagonism towards Westminster across Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which can only benefit the union.
Labour leader Keir Starmer has declared himself a unionist who would campaign for the union in any Border poll, although such a poll “is not even on the horizon”.
His party wants to start a different constitutional conversation by enhancing devolution around the UK with quasi-federal arrangements, including reforming or replacing the House of Lords. However, this is only to be consulted upon during Labour’s first term in office. After a decade of discourse on the UK breaking up, unionism is being invited to join a great, harmless changing of the subject.
The declining, splintering unionist vote has led to increased soul-searching during this election about “realignment”, a term usually taken to mean a merger of the DUP and the UUP, or an exchange of factions to create one liberal and one conservative party.
Forms of this argument have been going around in circles for a century, so a sudden breakthrough must be considered unlikely. The realignment unionists should be discussing, and which they have some chance of delivering, is changing their default inclination from Tory-leaning to Labour-leaning. This would be pragmatic, with Labour possibly set for a generation in power. It could also be a natural and overdue move.
Brexit ought to have shattered any remaining unionist illusions about the Conservatives. The antipathy is mutual: there is widespread Tory loathing for the DUP after the 2017-2019 confidence and supply agreement.
The UUP and the Conservatives were effectively one party for 80 years and formed an ill-starred electoral pact as recently as 2010. But the UUP is finding it easier than the DUP to leave its Tory past behind, having opposed Brexit during the EU referendum.
Embracing Labour is a different matter and both main unionist parties are struggling with it, although with little rational justification. The Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, conducted annually by Queen’s University Belfast and Ulster University, asked a new set of questions last year to gauge left-right positions on economic and social issues. With results broken down by religion, it found Protestants were a little more to the right than Catholics, a difference that could be explained by an older population, but still left-leaning on most issues, in particular on economics and immigration.
The opinions revealed were essentially traditional Labour values, a political baseline shared by unionist and nationalist communities. Unionist parties should not find it difficult to move towards this ground. If Labour manages to fix collapsing public service in Britain, there will be a clamour for Stormont to copy its policies in devolved areas. All parties in Northern Ireland should consider getting ahead of this, before they are accused of getting in the way.
Although the DUP and UUP have welcomed Labour’s apparently inevitable victory, nationalists are proving better at getting in front. The SDLP is making much of its “sister party” relationship with Labour, officially an international socialist connection, in reality a reflection of Irish nationalist sympathies throughout Labour’s rank and file. It is also the excuse to block Labour from running candidates in Northern Ireland, which nationalism has long opposed as a potential driver of UK political integration.
Sinn Féin shows no sign of ending Westminster abstentionism but it is the lead party at Stormont, where it is already echoing proposed Labour policies on the economy, industrial strategy and worker’s rights.
Labour intends to raise taxes by more than spending – technically austerity – to reduce the national debt. The oddities of devolutionary accounting mean Stormont will get all the extra spending, while the people of Northern Ireland will pay almost none of the extra taxes. Sinn Féin’s finance and economy ministers are lined up to win from this best of both worlds.
On the hardline fringes of unionism there will be those who predict Starmer is the UK’s Emmanuel Macron, a blank-slate centrist swept into office on a wave of exasperation. When he disappoints, popular anger will deliver a right-wing government. While that prediction could well be correct, holding out in the hope of it would be the stupidest move of all.