Should Labour run candidates in Northern Ireland?

Should the Irish & UK Labour Parties run candidates in the North of Ireland? That’s a question that we are asked regularly. It’s an issue which has been debated at party conferences both here and in the UK. I spoke to the UK Labour Party Conference two years ago on the issue.

Up to now the view of both Labour Parties has against running candidates. We have a sister party in the north, the SDLP, and to field candidates against them was not something we wanted to do.

Of course this approach has not been welcomed by the Northern Irish Labour Party (the NILP). They don't think their home is in the SDLP. As they pointed out in their recent pamphlet on the issue they consider the SDLP to be agnostic to trade union links, nationalist in terms of their community designation at Stormont and weak on the equality issues of a woman's right to choose and same-sex marriage.

The SDLP response is that they are changing their position in relation to the above, and that NILP members should join them and help to move the organisation forward from within.

At the UK Party Conference in 2015 there was a rigorous debate at the fringe meeting on whether to allow NILP to run in the north. One of the Labour Party MPs, Stephen Pound, was shouted at and called a colonialist when he gave a defence of the status quo.

This year the UK Labour Party has decided to review the situation and has asked its National Executive Committee to examine the issue and report back.

A delegation from the NEC travelled to Belfast and Dublin in November, to speak to the affected parties. I met them with some of my colleagues in Leinster House.

We heard that the party membership has gone from strength to strength in the north. At the time of the 2010 general election their membership was 350. Since the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader the membership has increased to over 2,000. A further 700 people have registered as supporters of the party.

At this stage they are comparable in size to the Alliance Party and possibly even the SDLP.

The question is what do we do to keep them motivated, active and helpful to our mutual cause?

To allow them to run against the SDLP is not something we would want to see. Although the SDLP is in electoral difficulty at the moment, and although some are openly courting an official link-up with Fianna Fáil, it is our view that we must support them now at their time of need.

Is there a way to square the circle, supporting the SDLP while at the same time harnessing this huge and hungry resource of the NILP.

One potential solution might be to learn from the experience of the Co-operative Party in the UK. 

The Co-operative Party is a separate party to the Labour Party but for the last 90 years they both have had an agreement not to field candidates against each other. Instead, they agree which party will contest each constituency before each election. Co-op MPs agree to be bound by the Labour Party manifesto and agree to take the Labour Party whip in the House of Commons. People can be members of both the Labour Party and the Co-op Party. Well known Co-op MPs include Stella Creasy and Stephen Twigg. Ed Balls was a member of the Co-op Party. So too is the new Labour Leader in Scotland, Richard Leonard, is a Co-op MSP. 

A similar model could work in Northern Ireland. There are 18 constituencies in the Stormont Assembly, each containing 5 seats. The SDLP have 12 seats in ten of these constituencies. In 3 of the remaining 8 constituencies they polled less than 5% of the vote in the 2017 Assembly elections. Why not let the NILP run in those three constituencies? They could concentrate their efforts there and would not be impacting on the likely return for the SDLP. There may even be room for a voting pact of sorts to be put in place between the NILP and the SDLP.

The current situation can not continue indefinitely. Almost 3,000 people have felt sufficiently enthused to join or register as party supporters in the north. If our parties don't reach out and try to find an accommodation of sorts with them then not only are we letting them down, we run the risk of driving them into someone else's arms.