Stormont’s ambitious four-year plan for government unveiled this month signals the return of “normalisation” to Northern Ireland and the best opportunity for a generation for the left to exert a real influence.
Not since the 1960s and the days of the now defunct Northern Ireland Labour Party has the moderate left been able to mobilise to such a significant extent.
The re-organisation of left-wing politics in the Northern Ireland has been helped by the election of the Labour-supporting Michael D Higgins as President of the Irish Republic and the fact that Irish Labour forms part of the coalition government in Dublin with the centre-right Fine Gael party.
Stormont aims to create 25,000 jobs, launch a single education authority for Northern Ireland, build 8,000 affordable homes, attract more tourists, tackle sectarianism and reduce the number of local councils from 26 to 11. This is the brainchild of the power-sharing Executive dominated by the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein.
With the SDLP and the Ulster Unionists still licking their wounds after damaging Assembly election results in May, the chances of an official Stormont opposition comprising both parties is highly unlikely.
The moderate nationalist SDLP has emerged from a bruising leadership tussle but continues to make little headway against the Sinn Fein bandwagon.
The UUP is in an equal predicament. Some Tories have even gone as far as to urge the UUP to disband and form a new Conservative-led movement.
But UUP grassroots members remember the disastrous New Force project when then linked up with the Conservatives to combat the 2010 general election..
The Ulster Conservative and Unionist New Force was intended to herald a new era for Northern Ireland in national politics. It failed miserably as not one of its candidates won a House of Commons seat.
Although DUP First Minister Peter Robinson lost his East Belfast seat, his party still retained its other representatives at Westminster without a entering into a marriage of convenience with the Conservatives.
Opponents of any new UUP/Tory deal point out that it was one Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Heath, who scrapped the original Stormont Parliament in March 1972, and another, Margaret Thatcher, who signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement in November 1985, giving the Republic its first major say in the running of Northern Ireland since partition in the 1920s.
In the late 1980s, the Northern Ireland Conservative Association was set up in direct opposition to the Ulster Unionists. Gone were the days when leading Tories appeared as guests of honour at meetings of the UUP’s Ulster Monday Club. With the Tory-UUP project now in tatters, the left has an opportunity to take the moral high ground of Northern Ireland politics.
The days of the middle and upper classes dominating the pro-Union agenda are over. The old agricultural Unionist families can no longer call the shots at Stormont. Many in the Protestant working class feel abandoned by both the DUP and UUP.
Although both Sinn Fein and the DUP started as economically radical movements, they are increasingly perceived as the political establishement at Stormont. With the SDLP and UUP on the sidelines, perhaps the Labour Party should again consider trying to the gap in this particularly political market.
The Tories are campaigning under the banner that they – and they alone – champion the notion of non-sectarian politics in Northern Ireland. Their supporters in the pro-Union community point to the 2009 election success of Conservative and Unionist MEP Jim Nicholson. However, it was not an attractive Tory policy that got Nicholson re-elected. It was the split between the DUP and the hardline Traditional Unionist Voice.
Unionists would be foolish to put their trust inWestminster’s Tories again but Labour does have a limited opportunityto advance progressive politics in Northern Ireland. Time is not on its side.
