Newton Emerson: Politics in Northern Ireland is tricky, as Britain’s Labour Party will soon see

The British Labour Party is inching towards standing in elections in Northern Ireland. It allowed residents to join in 2003 and to form a regional association in 2008, the Labour Party in Northern Ireland (LPNI).

Labour’s ruling body, the 39-member national executive Committee (NEC), keeps the election ban under regular review. A campaign to lift it has won support from trade unions and senior party figures. This week, two members of the NEC said it is time to provide the people of Northern Ireland with “an option to vote for a nonsectarian centre-left party” – words that will enrage the SDLP, which thinks it provides that option already.

The NEC members were impressed by a LucidTalk poll last year which found that 6 per cent of Northern Ireland voters would give a Labour candidate a first preference and 32 per cent a lower preference. Half of those surveyed were opposed to Labour running, suggesting the issue is quite divisive, although not on constitutional lines – slightly more nationalists than unionists endorsed Labour participation.

LucidTalk has a good track record predicting elections, but this was not a poll about an election – it was a hypothetical question. Election results sound a loud note of caution. The Conservatives first ran in Northern Ireland in 1992, promising a similar ‘nonsectarian’ dawn. They took 6 per cent and almost won a Westminster seat, but their vote soon fell below 1 per cent, where it has languished ever since. This fits a pattern for new entrants to Northern Ireland politics, where novelty and hope turn swiftly to disappointment and decline.

There’s an obvious solution to the migration row: compatible national identity cards for Ireland and Britain

---

Rwanda immigration law may turn out to be another Brexit

---

Battle lines are being drawn in the North over sex education and hate crimes

---

Simon Harris was right. Many southerners know London or Paris better than Belfast

---

When Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader in 2015, LPNI’s membership shot up from a few hundred to almost 3,000, more than any other party in the region. Energised by this influx, LPNI defied the election ban and fielded Stormont candidates in 2016 under the banner of the Labour Representation Committee. It won 1,500 first preferences, meaning Labour had more members than voters. There were also splits, expulsions and defections to a rival new far-left group – a fitting epitaph to the lunacy of the Corbyn years.

Haunting it all is the glory of the party’s previous incarnation, the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP). The People’s Front of Judea-style confusion between their names is priceless.

In its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, NILP routinely commanded a quarter of the vote, but that was in a different political age, competing against one overweening Tory-linked unionist party and one disorganised, abstentionist nationalist party.

A great deal of complex history lies behind Labour’s semidetached status in Northern Ireland. Partly it is due to the belief by left-wing and Irish nationalist members in Britain that extending normal operations to Northern Ireland would be unionism by default. This belief is almost certainly correct, but the party is losing its squeamishness over it. The importance of Scotland to Labour’s recovery is making it more explicitly unionist. Leader Keir Starmer says he would campaign for the union if a Labour government was obliged to hold an Irish Border poll.

LPNI says Labour would designate as “other” at Stormont and form cross-community and all-Ireland partnerships via the trade union movement and the Party of European Socialists, whose other members include Irish Labour and the SDLP.

However, LPNI also says it is “uniquely placed to win votes in working class unionist areas” – always Labour’s heartland in its heyday. The next scheduled elections in Northern Ireland are for Westminster next year and Stormont in 2027, although Stormont’s collapse could be resolved by a trip to the polls at any time.

While Labour might want to introduce itself in a general election it is expected to win, it has no chance of winning any seats in Northern Ireland under Westminster’s first-past-the-post system. Most people would see Labour as a wasted vote, ensuring a terrible result and an early start to the cycle of disappointment.

Stormont is more promising. If Labour really has potential opening support of 6 per cent and this is skewed towards unionist areas, there are seven constituencies where the party could be in contention for the final seat. It might even win one, by fluke on the tenth count. Stranger things have happened.

The main impact would be on marginal seats for other parties. Labour would be more likely to take votes from unionists and Alliance than from the SDLP and Sinn Féin, yet it could also bring out new voters more likely to transfer to unionists and Alliance. In either case, it would be slotting into a unionist-Alliance spectrum fading at the orange end. If a Labour government aligned Britain more closely with Europe, pledging to solve Brexit problems that still had the DUP frozen in the headlights, Labour could begin carving out a serious role for itself with the electorate of Northern Ireland.