Relaunch NILP

By AM Wednesday, April 10, 2013

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Former Blanket columnist Dr John Coulter maintains that the North's socialists should relaunch the old Northern Ireland Labour Party as a radical alternative to the rush to grab the Centre vote across Ulster. A shortened version of this article appeared in his Ireland Eye column in the British Labour Party's Tribune magazine on 5 April.

If Red Ed won’t give the green light to Labour contesting elections in Ulster, then the Province’s socialists should revamp the old Northern Ireland Labour Party.

 Before its demise in the 1970s, the NILP could give the Stormont-dominated Unionist Party a run for its money.  Indeed, had the Troubles not kicked off in the late 1960s, the NILP would probably have replaced the old Nationalist Party as the official Stormont Opposition.

Over the next three years, the Labour movement in Ulster will have its best opportunity for a generation of becoming a significant electoral force.

The official reason for both the British and Irish Labour parties not contesting elections in Northern Ireland is that they want to save their supposed sister party, the moderate Catholic Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) from oblivion.

But the hard reality is that the SDLP is unsalvageable. Sinn Fein, the one-time apologist for the Provisional IRA, has pulled off the impossible – eating in substantially to the SDLP’s traditional middle class Catholic vote while simultaneously holding on to its working classrepublican heartlands. Within the next three years, Sinn Fein will continue to shove the SDLP into the dustbin of nationalist history.

In the Unionist community, the Right-wing is in disarray with Protestant voter apathy the order of the day. The Right has really only two parties of choice, the Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) party, which is essentially an anti-DUP movement, and the fledging Ukip. There has even been talk of a coalition, even a merger, between the TUV and Ukip. 

Northern Ireland politics has now become fixated with who rules the Centre ground. With the inevitable demise of the SDLP, a huge gap is emerging on the Left for a non-sectarian Labour movement.

The existing Left parties in Northern Ireland – the Workers’ Party, Irish Republican Socialist Party, Republican Sinn Fein, 32 County Sovereignty Movement, eirgi, even the Progressive UnionistParty – all have paramilitary-related baggage.

The ace card for any new Labour movement is that the Centre ground is becoming so crowded with parties, that the vote will be fatally split, allowing a single Labour movement to take seats.

Ironically, because of Right-wing Unionist apathy, the two main Unionist parties – Peter Robinson’s DUP and Mike Nesbitt’s UUP – have had to moderate their policies and compete for Centre voters. That Centre market has already become increasingly dominated by the non-sectarian Alliance Party, which has witnessed a steady rise in its vote since its previous low point of 1999.

If the rapid demise of the UUP and SDLP continues, Alliance is in pole position to become Northern Ireland’s third largest party after the next round of European, council and Assembly elections.

That Centre ground just got even tighter after two outspoken and high-profile liberal UUP Assembly members Basil McCrea and John McCallister left the Ulster Unionists to form their own, as yet unnamed, liberal pluralist pro-Union party.

The virtually intolerable squeeze on the Centre vote has been pushed to breaking point with the decision for the reformed Northern Ireland Tories’ decision to also brand itself as a pluralistCentre movement.

Gone are the days in the early 1990s whenmany Northern Ireland Conservative Associations were openly Thatcherite in their political stances.

But Northern Ireland socialists have some bitter medicine to swallow. They can either continue their uphill struggle to persuade the British Labour leadership to relent on its ‘no elections’ strategy, or they can relaunch the NILP and start winning seats.

The party’s electoral history should never be ignored. Although it never won a Commons seat, it amassed nearly 100,000 votes in the 1970 General Election.

Founded in 1924, its peak years were from 1958 to 1965. It had four Stormont MPs, all from Belfast, and was only 8,000 votes behind the dominant Unionist Party in the city.

With austerity cuts biting really hard across Northern Ireland, there certainly is both room and a demand for a well-organised Labour party.

In spite of being one of the oldest parties on the island of Ireland, the Dublin-based Irish Labour Party always made the unwise decision of not organizing and contesting elections in Ulster.

But time is not on the Labour movement’s side. It should not get bogged down on which brand of socialist ideology to follow, or which Leftist writer to hail as its hero.

The new NILP should have two principal aims – to avowedly fight the austerity cuts of either the DUP/Sinn Fein Stormont Executive or the Tory/Liberal Commons coalition, and to mobilize the Unionist and Nationalist working class back to the polling booths.

Organise, not theorise, should be the motto of the new NILP. In three years, the NILP will be the official Stormont Opposition, or yet another socialist pipedream for Northern Ireland. It is an opportunity socialists must not let slip.