the growth of the Alliance Party. "People are moving beyond tribalism," the refrain goes. "The middle ground is taking over."
It is a convenient fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. The rise of the "neither" designation is not the birth of a new, post-constitutional identity. The party currently occupying that ground is Alliance, but what actually sits underneath it is a class alliance, not a resolved one — sections of the middle classes and the urban petite bourgeoisie on both sides of the sectarian divide, holding together for as long as their shared interests in stability, property, and professional advancement outweigh the pull of their separate national loyalties. It is not a homogeneous bloc waiting to be wooed wholesale by either side.
Start with the party's own voters. The University of Liverpool's 2024 general election survey found 68.1% of people who actually vote Alliance want to remain in the UK, against 31.2% who back Irish unity — on the electorate's face, a party that leans towards the status quo. But look past the voters to the people who've actually joined the party, and the picture changes completely. Research commissioned for the book The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland – Beyond Unionism and Nationalism found 38.1% of Alliance members support Irish unity, 27.6% want to remain in the UK, and 30.1% are undecided. Two surveys of the same party, pointing in different directions, is not evidence of a coherent political philosophy. It's evidence of a coalition of convenience — voters parking a decision they haven't made behind a party that isn't asking them to make it, and a membership already split three ways underneath. This piece isn't claiming that bloc will swing to a united Ireland on polling day. It's pointing out there is no "it" to swing at all — only a community raised, like every other, inside the sectarian structures of the northern state, whose eventual choice will follow the same two forces already at work everywhere else on this island: the community it was reared in, and which outcome actually serves it's material interests better.
Its growth has been built on a coalition of convenience, drawing middle-class professionals and younger voters who have temporarily parked the border question to focus on everyday governance. But when a border poll is triggered, the nature of material self-interest changes instantly. The question ceases to be "who fixes the potholes today?" and becomes "which state guarantees your healthcare, your real wages, your pension, and your children's access to the world's largest single market?" As established, the material balance of that calculation has already inverted toward the South.
The Alliance leadership knows this balance cannot hold. Naomi Long's shift toward suggesting the party might "step back" from a border poll campaign and treat it as a matter of individual conscience, with representatives free to vote as they wish, is a real retreat from her own 2022 position that Alliance would "undoubtedly" take a side eventually — an admission of structural vulnerability, not confident neutrality. Former Alliance leader John Alderdice put it more bluntly still: sitting on the fence is "not politically realistic," he argued, pointing to what he called an "almost inexorable trajectory towards a united Ireland." A party with genuinely no guidance to give on the single largest constitutional question in its country's history isn't rising above the divide. It's postponing the moment it has to pick a side of it.
The structural fault lines are already visible, and they run in both directions at once. When Carole Howard defected to the UUP, the word she reached for was "now" — she said she could "now openly and comfortably express" pro-Union views she evidently hadn't felt free to voice inside Alliance, a defection the party itself called "an act of bad faith." Months earlier, former councillor David Rossiter had walked the other way, resigning from the party in October 2024 because he could "no longer support a party that has not embraced the possibility of a new Ireland." Rossiter didn't just leave quietly. He pointed directly at the same membership poll cited above and accused his own former leadership of sitting on it deliberately, telling the Irish News he assumed the party "took a strategic decision not to engage further in order to protect their unionist leaning voter base" — happy, in his words, to take nationalist votes in swing seats without ever reciprocating by acknowledging what a third of its own members actually wanted. One defector leaving because the party wouldn't let her say she was pro-Union. Another leaving because it wouldn't act on how pro-unity a third of its own membership actually was. That's not a coherent centre. That's a fault line with people falling off both sides of it.
Perhaps the most tragic exposure of this internal contradiction was the experience of Anna Lo. From an Alliance perspective a progressive, pro-European, anti-sectarian figure who ought to have represented their permanent future of "civic" politics in the North, Lo was hounded out of political life by loyalist intimidation after daring to describe a united Ireland as economically logical. Her exit was the canary in the coal mine: it proved that when the constitutional pressure ratchets up, the polite veneer of "neither" vanishes, and the underlying state mechanics reassert themselves.
When the border poll is eventually called, that class alliance comes apart. Alliance will not navigate the referendum as a neutral mediator, nor will it successfully convince its own divided membership to look the other way. The party will splinter along the same fault line running through the rest of the North — its pro-Union wing drifting back to the UUP or DUP to defend the status quo, its progressive and younger cohorts moving toward the material logic already laid out in my second article.
The "middle ground" is not a new political tribe destined to anchor the 1921 settlement forever. It is a cross-sectarian arrangement of convenience among people who share a class position but not a nation, raised the same way as everyone else in this artificial statelet and watching the same clock. Anna Lo's departure was their warning. The actuarial and material numbers already established are what's still ticking. The only remaining question is whether Alliance breaks apart before the referendum begins or during the count.
It is a convenient fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. The rise of the "neither" designation is not the birth of a new, post-constitutional identity. The party currently occupying that ground is Alliance, but what actually sits underneath it is a class alliance, not a resolved one — sections of the middle classes and the urban petite bourgeoisie on both sides of the sectarian divide, holding together for as long as their shared interests in stability, property, and professional advancement outweigh the pull of their separate national loyalties. It is not a homogeneous bloc waiting to be wooed wholesale by either side.
Start with the party's own voters. The University of Liverpool's 2024 general election survey found 68.1% of people who actually vote Alliance want to remain in the UK, against 31.2% who back Irish unity — on the electorate's face, a party that leans towards the status quo. But look past the voters to the people who've actually joined the party, and the picture changes completely. Research commissioned for the book The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland – Beyond Unionism and Nationalism found 38.1% of Alliance members support Irish unity, 27.6% want to remain in the UK, and 30.1% are undecided. Two surveys of the same party, pointing in different directions, is not evidence of a coherent political philosophy. It's evidence of a coalition of convenience — voters parking a decision they haven't made behind a party that isn't asking them to make it, and a membership already split three ways underneath. This piece isn't claiming that bloc will swing to a united Ireland on polling day. It's pointing out there is no "it" to swing at all — only a community raised, like every other, inside the sectarian structures of the northern state, whose eventual choice will follow the same two forces already at work everywhere else on this island: the community it was reared in, and which outcome actually serves it's material interests better.
Its growth has been built on a coalition of convenience, drawing middle-class professionals and younger voters who have temporarily parked the border question to focus on everyday governance. But when a border poll is triggered, the nature of material self-interest changes instantly. The question ceases to be "who fixes the potholes today?" and becomes "which state guarantees your healthcare, your real wages, your pension, and your children's access to the world's largest single market?" As established, the material balance of that calculation has already inverted toward the South.
The Alliance leadership knows this balance cannot hold. Naomi Long's shift toward suggesting the party might "step back" from a border poll campaign and treat it as a matter of individual conscience, with representatives free to vote as they wish, is a real retreat from her own 2022 position that Alliance would "undoubtedly" take a side eventually — an admission of structural vulnerability, not confident neutrality. Former Alliance leader John Alderdice put it more bluntly still: sitting on the fence is "not politically realistic," he argued, pointing to what he called an "almost inexorable trajectory towards a united Ireland." A party with genuinely no guidance to give on the single largest constitutional question in its country's history isn't rising above the divide. It's postponing the moment it has to pick a side of it.
The structural fault lines are already visible, and they run in both directions at once. When Carole Howard defected to the UUP, the word she reached for was "now" — she said she could "now openly and comfortably express" pro-Union views she evidently hadn't felt free to voice inside Alliance, a defection the party itself called "an act of bad faith." Months earlier, former councillor David Rossiter had walked the other way, resigning from the party in October 2024 because he could "no longer support a party that has not embraced the possibility of a new Ireland." Rossiter didn't just leave quietly. He pointed directly at the same membership poll cited above and accused his own former leadership of sitting on it deliberately, telling the Irish News he assumed the party "took a strategic decision not to engage further in order to protect their unionist leaning voter base" — happy, in his words, to take nationalist votes in swing seats without ever reciprocating by acknowledging what a third of its own members actually wanted. One defector leaving because the party wouldn't let her say she was pro-Union. Another leaving because it wouldn't act on how pro-unity a third of its own membership actually was. That's not a coherent centre. That's a fault line with people falling off both sides of it.
Perhaps the most tragic exposure of this internal contradiction was the experience of Anna Lo. From an Alliance perspective a progressive, pro-European, anti-sectarian figure who ought to have represented their permanent future of "civic" politics in the North, Lo was hounded out of political life by loyalist intimidation after daring to describe a united Ireland as economically logical. Her exit was the canary in the coal mine: it proved that when the constitutional pressure ratchets up, the polite veneer of "neither" vanishes, and the underlying state mechanics reassert themselves.
When the border poll is eventually called, that class alliance comes apart. Alliance will not navigate the referendum as a neutral mediator, nor will it successfully convince its own divided membership to look the other way. The party will splinter along the same fault line running through the rest of the North — its pro-Union wing drifting back to the UUP or DUP to defend the status quo, its progressive and younger cohorts moving toward the material logic already laid out in my second article.
The "middle ground" is not a new political tribe destined to anchor the 1921 settlement forever. It is a cross-sectarian arrangement of convenience among people who share a class position but not a nation, raised the same way as everyone else in this artificial statelet and watching the same clock. Anna Lo's departure was their warning. The actuarial and material numbers already established are what's still ticking. The only remaining question is whether Alliance breaks apart before the referendum begins or during the count.
⏩ Packy Carty is an East Tyrone Socialist Republican.
