Should The Labour Party Target Loyalist Working Class?

Ex-BLANKET commentator DR. JOHN COULTER is a columnist with the British Labour Party’s Tribune magazine. He argues if the Labour Party can organise among the Loyalist working class, it can outflank the Tories’ latest Northern Ireland venture.

 
British Labour has the perfect opportunity to outgun the latest bid by the Tories to organise inNorthern Ireland– but it only has two years to make a significant impact.For the third time in as many decades, the Northern Ireland Conservatives are making a Custer’s Last Stand to attractUlster’s voters.
 Their first bid flopped in the early 1990s when they failed to unseat Popular Unionist MP James Kilfedder from his North Down bolthole.
 The North Down Tories led the campaign for formal recognition from Conservative Central Office. Eventually, a number of Conservative constituency associations were formed throughoutNorthern Ireland, mainly in safe Unionist seats.
In spite of this happening during the Thatcher era, theNorthern Irelandassociations were anything but Right-wing. In fact, their membership and activists in the 1990s would have fitted politically snugly into current Prime Minister David Cameron’s Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition.
The 1990s Tories targeted the Unionist middle classes, hoping to attract integrationists from within the Ulster Unionist Party and Protestants from the Alliance Party who wanted national politics introduced intoUlster.

   This attempt flopped as core Unionist working class voters largely ignored the middle class dominated, middle ground leaning Conservatives. Without working class loyalist backing, the Conservative experiment soon floundered.

  The second bid came when they teamed up with the already election-battered and civil war-ridden Ulster Unionists in the doomed Ulster Conservative and Unionist New Force project.

   None of its candidates were elected in the last General Election, and the pact with the UUP ended in a very publicly bitter political divorce. Essentially, the DUP had stolen the New Force policies, its voters, and ultimately its seats.

   Now the Tories are hoping it will be third time lucky with the formal launch of the new-look Northern Ireland Conservatives.

   But all this has achieved is to create a four-way split for the Centre Right ground inNorthern Ireland– a move which can only benefit the fledgling British Labour movement.

   British Labour’s sister party, the moderate nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party, is certain to lose even more ground – and seats – to a rampant Sinn Fein, which is steadily becoming the main voice of the anti-austerity lobby in Ireland north and south of the border.

   Although the Irish Labour Party is in a coalition government inDublinwith the Centre Right Fine Gael party, there is no indication Irish Labour wants, or will, organise north of the border.

   With the demise of the old Northern Ireland Labour Party in the 1970s,Ulstersocialism tended only to be represented by the Hard Left. Electorally,Northern Irelandis ripe for the plucking for a Centre Left party, so enter stage left British Labour.

   But time is not on British Labour’s side. The revamped Northern Ireland Tories have realised that to make a real impact, they have to score heavily in Protestant working class areas.

   Many working class Protestants have simply abandoned the ballot box and thousands have even failed to register as voters. They feel the middle class dominated Democratic and Ulster Unionist parties have turned their backs on the plight of the Protestant working people.

   With more Cameron cuts expected in the coming months, even loyalist leaders are predicting the emergence of a Protestant underclass similar to that which existed in the American southern states among the Afro-American community.

   Another reason for the failure of the 1990s Tory project was that it majored in the middle class. Conservative associations were seen as nothing more than trendy wine and cheese supper clubs, not serious political movements.

   If the Tories thump the Diamond Jubilee drum and brand themselves as a working class British patriotic movement, it could well eat into loyalist heartlands – and that means council, Assembly and even Commons seats.

   During the era of the original Stormont Parliament from the 1930s to 1972, the aristocratic Unionist Party could always rely on the numerical superiority of the Protestant workers to keep Unionists in power.

   But in last year’s Assembly poll, in many loyalist working class areas – both rural and urban – less than 30 per cent of Protestants were voting.

   The next electoral test will be the European poll in 2014 when threeNorthern Irelandseats are up for grabs. Such is the influence of the DUP/Sinn Fein coalition on the Stormont power-sharing Executive that those two parties look certain to retain their MEPs.

   But with the Centre Right heavily split, with transfers and mobilisation of the Protestant working class, a British Labour runner could sneak into the third seat – that’s if the Tories don’t eat into that working class sector.

   British Labour – because of its SDLP link – has traditionally made the mistake of trying to primarily organise in the Catholic working class.

   But Sinn Fein has got to power – and is remaining as the leading nationalist party – by maintaining its high wire political balancing act. This is holding on to its working class republican heartlands, while successfully promoting itself in the electorally lucrative Catholic middle class areas.

   British Labour must box clever and target the loyalist working class first, and hope the Tories try to sell themselves as a modern-day, Right-wing Thatcherite movement. 

   Thatcher may have been Unionism’s darling for standing up to the republican hunger strikers in 1980 and 1981. But Thatcher signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement of November 1985 only served to alienate tens of thousands of working class loyalists from her.

   Many modern-day loyalists now associate Thatcher with the Hillsborough Agreement and the massive Ulster Says No and Ulster Still Says No rallies. If the Northern Ireland Conservatives shift to the political Right to give themselves a unique identity, they will merely be branded as Thatcherites under a new banner.

   If Cameron’s European Union referendum campaign splits theWestminstercoalition, theUKcould have another snap General Election on its hands before the 2014 European poll.

   The key question is not so much if British Labour under leader Ed Miliband is ready for government, but is British Labour ready to target the loyalist working class?