Recapturing our purpose - Paul McErlean
Fifty years ago six Stormont MPs and one Senator signed a document on the creation of a new party, this party, that was to be named the Social Democratic and Labour Party. Like any political grouping, it was a coalition, with those like Gerry Fitt emphasising the connection with the Labour movement and John Hume, the Social Democrat, hoping to emulate the model of the German SPD. Some of the key aims set out in this initial document were to secure a just and adequate distribution of wealth, to support organised labour, to establish state industries, to be an anti-sectarian force and to see the eventual reunification of Ireland achieved through the consent of the people of the North and in the South. This ethos remains today in the aims and principles contained in our current party constitution, which begins with “To organise and maintain in Northern Ireland a Socialist party”, an aspiration for what the SDLP should be.
One of the founding MPs was Paddy Devlin, who wrote in his 1993 autobiography ‘Straight Left’ that the existing politics of the day had fostered and maintained division through sectarianism, and the result: “pressing social and economic issues were ignored, allowing poverty, squalor, unemployment and disadvantage to thrive. The resulting misery was shared by the working class, without distinction, between unionists and nationalists”. Although much has changed for the better in how we conduct our politics, I can’t help but believe this rhymes with some of my own thoughts of today’s politics. The main two parties currently leading the NI executive seem to be in a constant state of squabbling, and most of the issues we face are dragged back to the same old green or orange back and forth. The late Seamus Mallon aptly summarised it in 2018 when he said: “politics has been debased and diminished by these two political silos which have almost Balkanised the Northern Ireland that I live in”.
Meanwhile the Department of Communities Poverty Bulletin for 2018/2019 published in May of this year revealed 19% of individuals in Northern Ireland were living in relative poverty, this figure rises to 24% for children and 16% of individuals in Northern Ireland were living in absolute poverty. These numbers are calculated from households with an income of lower than 60% of the median household income and with Northern Ireland having such low household income the reality of poverty in the North is likely much worse than what the figures allude to. All of these figures are also on the rise. I worry about how many more have been sunk into poverty during this pandemic and the as impacts of Brexit loom we can expect the cost of living to go up as well, adversely affecting those on the breadline. We must overcome the tribal distractions if we are to effectively combat poverty and inequality.
It is no secret that the past couple decades have been trying times for the SDLP as we have witnessed the gradual haemorrhaging of our voter base and the continuing reduction of our elected representatives in consecutive elections. I recall during my chairship of the SDLP Youth leaving the Seven Towers leisure centre in Ballymena at 4am after the 2017 General election count. I was at a complete loss, knowing the devastation we all felt. I organised the recording of a video with other youth members to try to channel the emotion of losing all our representation at Westminster into a spirit of fight back, but all I felt on my drive home was heartbreak. It was a tough night.
Fast forward to election night in December 2019, and the emotions couldn’t have been more different. In my own constituency of Mid Ulster, our candidate Denise Johnston, who I had the pleasure of serving as election agent for, increased our vote from 9.8% to 14.3%, marking a tremendous reversal of recent electoral trends for us in the constituency. Where we won, we won big with our party leader, Colum Eastwood, winning a whopping 57% of the vote (a 17,110 majority!) in Foyle and the brilliant Claire Hanna achieving another jaw dropping result with 57.2% of the vote (a 15,401 majority!) in South Belfast.
The election was of course a unique election framed in the context of Brexit, but we won these seats and increased our vote across the board because it was our candidates who offered the genuine alternative from the previous 2 and a half years of misrepresentation or no representation. We can win again and come back strong at the 2022 Assembly elections but only if we offer the genuine alternative to the main two parties.
If we are to once again find our purpose as a party we can’t revert back to the way things were in the past by solely relying on our core voter base and hoping for the best. Our success as a party will not be found in outscoring our political opponents nor in outbidding their rhetoric but by offering a genuine alternative for the people of Northern Ireland. In this effort I think it essential to reconnect with the principles and aims that our founders set out fifty years ago, of constitutional republicanism and of socialism.
A speech that oft comes to mind is that of Michael D Higgins speaking on the Fianna Fáil and Green Party government proposal to cut the minimum wage in 2010 and in particular his words when he quotes Amartya Sen: “the test of citizenship is your ability to participate in society without shame”, as the core element of republicanism is not nationalism but rather citizenship. The strength of our society should be determined by the ease in which our people can actively engage and participate within it. With this in mind our constitutional republicanism cannot come without our socialism. As our founders envisaged it is the purpose of our party to defend and emancipate those who are vulnerable and those in poverty, to enable and protect our workers and their families and to lift the people of Ireland up and ensure we all benefit from our shared success. It is this ethos that we must recapture.
Let us rise above the status quo politics of the DUP & Sinn Féin and offer the Ireland that Hume had envisaged in which we use our political power “to see an Ireland of partnership where we wage war on want and poverty, where we reach out to the marginalised and dispossessed, where we build together a future that can be as great as our dreams allow.”
Paul McErlean
