Alasdair McDonnell New SDLP leader

On Sunday Alasdair McDonnell, the member of parliament for the Social Democratic and Labour Party from South Belfast, was elected the new leader of the party beating out three other candidates including Deputy Leader Patsy McGlone and Environmental Minister Alex Attwood. His tenure got off to a rough start when he decided to give an acceptance speech from a lecturn without notes using a teleprompter (autocue in UK speak) that was badly positioned so that he was blinded by the glare of the lights and couldn't read his speech. Some commentators took this as a bad omen.
 

McDonnell vowed to make the party competitive with Sinn Fein for the first time in years. Because of his impressive vote-winning performances in South Belfast he was chosen leader over his rivals. But the party has a basic problem with policy and strategy. It wants to attract Protestant members, but most members favor keeping the support for a united Ireland as part of its platform. If it does keep this it will find very few Protestants willing to join a Catholic party. And if it abandons this goal, it may lose many supporters to rival Sinn Fein without attracting many Protestants as compensation. Sinn Fein has stolen the SDLP's policies--plagiarized them without citation--and is better organized and sexier. The Shinners can persuade many young voters that it was the IRA's terrorist campaign that won all the concessions in equal status and power sharing that nationalists now enjoy in Northern Ireland. For the SDLP to convince them that the "armed struggle" delayed the delivery of these prizes rather than delivered them is a hard sell to people who did not live through The Troubles.

Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness may have also stirred up trouble for the SDLP as well as for his own party by going South to contest the Irish presidential election and then delivering the prize to Labour Party candidate Michael D. Higgins from unofficial Fianna Fail candidate Sean Gallagher. This might lead FF to enter Northern Ireland and start organizing branches in nationalist areas. This would strip voters from the SDLP in elections as more nationalist non-Sinn Fein voters choose to vote for an all-Ireland party rather than one that is merely committed to a united Ireland. Here is an exploration of that argument.

The SDLP has a choice between temporarily surrendering ministries to the rival Sinn Fein parties by going into opposition, possibly in conjunction with the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and Party, or permanently playing second fiddle to Sinn Fein. Here is the argument for the latter course. The fact that the SDLP was unable to cooperate with the UUP when both were the leading parties under the Good Friday Agreement from 1998 to 2001 bodes ill for future cooperation in opposition. Most SDLP voters gave their lower preference votes to the rival Republicans rather than to their unionist allies in the UUP. Likewise UUP voters gave their lower preference votes to the DUP rather than to the SDLP. Sectarianism still runs strong in Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Party has called on the UUP to dissolve itself and form a new party with the Tories. This was probably a deliberate way of forcing the UUP to cut its links to the Conservatives before the 2014 election. This will possibly make the UUP more receptive to a joint opposition strategy with the SDLP and Alliance.

The Troubles of the SDLP

Yesterday Margaret Ritchie announced that she would be stepping down as leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) in Northern Ireland after less than two years on the job. The party had performed poorly in the election for the Northern Ireland Assembly in May and her deputy, Patsy McGlone, had announced that he would be challenging her in the mandatory leadership election. Her previous challenger, Dr. Alasdair McDonnell, is expected to also contest the election.

Ritchie is the fourth leader of the SDLP. The party was formed in August 1970 out of the remnants of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), the body that formulated the strategy of civil rights marches as a means of protesting anti-Catholic discrimination in Northern Ireland at the start of The Troubles in 1968. The SDLP was a de facto shotgun marriage of NICRA and two representatives from two other parties, Republican Labour and the Northern Ireland Labour Party, to unite all six of the nationalist members of the Stormont Parliament (the forerunner of the Northern Ireland Assembly, which was closed down in March 1972). The party advocated a united Ireland and non-violence as well as an end to discrimination and social democracy. The first leader chosen was Gerry Fitt, who was the only Westmister (British parliament) MP out of the six founding members. But the de facto leader of the party during its first decade was John Hume. In 1979 Fitt was ousted after he advocated cooperating with the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) in support of voluntary power sharing. Hume took over the party and remained the leader for the next 22 years. During that time he launched the Northern Ireland peace process with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and the Irish government in Dublin.

Hume voluntarily retired as leader of the SDLP in 2001 and named his protege, Mark Durkan, as his successor. Durkan presided over the decline of the party as the other nationalist party, Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, overtook it. This first occured in local government elections in 2001 and was then confirmed in the next Westminster election. Durkan benefitted from being the annoited successor to the charismatic Hume. Durkan then stepped down as leader in early 2010 at age fifty to concentrate on serving as MP for his Foyle constituency that he had inherited from Hume. Ritchie, the MP for South Down, beat McDonnell to emerge as the new leader.

The SDLP's decline is due to a number of factors. First, it has never developed an efficient electoral machinery for fighting elections. This really hurt when going up against Sinn Fein, which benefitted on election day from the help of the military wing of the Republican Movement. Sinn Fein and the IRA had developed a very efficient party machinery that had people impersonating voters--the old, sick, and alcoholic who didn't vote--at the polls. Second, once the peace process got going many nationalists wanted to reward Sinn Fein and the IRA for ending the war. So they lent their votes to the Republicans, and eventually the loan became permanent. Third, the British government under Prime Minister Tony Blair had a policy of appeasement toward the Republicans in order to keep the peace process on track. Sinn Fein became expert on extorting tribute from London in exchange for doing what they had already signed up to do in the Good Friday Agreement. As a result the two moderate parties who had negotiated the GFA, the SDLP and the Ulster Unionists, suffered at the hands of the electorate. Unionist voters punished them for the IRA's failure to disarm and the British policy of appeasement; nationalist voters rewarded Sinn Fein for the benefits that they extracted at (offstage) gunpoint from the British. Here is an article (go to the link on the site for the Belfast Telegraph article by Liam Clarke) discussing the problem's of the party under Ritchie's leadership.

The UUP has actually declined in recent years more sharply than has the SDLP. The only real solution to the problems of both parties is by their weaning themselves from the teets of the Northern Ireland Office and the Executive by going into opposition. This is difficult because the Good Friday Agreement was designed to get all parties to participate and share power rather than to provide voters with efficient democratic government. The way to do this is to form a pact between the two parties in which both go into opposition and present themselves to voters as an alternative government with their own policies. This might prove difficult, as, according to Clarke, those who elected Ritchie last time wanted the party to remain the same and not adapt to new circumstances. The GFA should also be modified to allow for an official opposition as at Westminster. The mother of parliaments has given birth to a bastard child and it needs to be restrained and reformed.