This is a seat that needed a big name to get the UUs over the win line this time out… Handing it back to a pair of old hands would certainly give the DUP something to run at, given how last time Jimmy Spratt picked up 29.6% to McGimpsey’s 22.2%. Indeed Spratt used a piece in the South Belfast News today to remind the UUs they could do a deal over the seat, just like they used to do in the past…

But Spratt himself is unlikely to be good enough this time out either. Whilst he was only just short of the mark the last time, the TUV effect (however weak or strong it proves) will likely tip the seat even further away from him. But the DUP still have time to contemplate their precise response to the Ulster Unionist/Conservaitve choice here. Could they choose a game changing candidate?

McDonnell got 30.1% last time, marginally ahead of Spratt. But he has had the opportunity to dig in to the constituency which may help him in turn dig further into Sinn Fein and Alliance votes than he did in 05. Last time out he got little public sympathy from Sinn Fein’s leadership, and in the case of the Alliance they now have a sitting MLA in the constituency whose vote they will be very keen to preserve. So even for McDonnell it will be a matter of squeezing out votes from wherever he find get them.

Even if McDonnell is a notional favourite, I would not like to call the overall winner… Still without a deal with the DUP neither the Minister for Health nor councillor Stoker will take the seat back for the Ulster Unionists, which may be just as well, since the Conservatives began the day with this little number on the evils of double-jobbing:

“The Conservatives were the first party in Northern Ireland to call for an end to double-jobbing in Northern Ireland. Voters want full-time MLAs, MPs and MEPs and rightly believe they currently get a raw deal when some of their elected politicians split their time between Stormont and Westminster.
“We have introduced amendments to legislation that are aimed at ending double-jobbing by Northern Ireland politicians at Stormont and Westminster. They are also intended to ensure that all decisions on MLAs’ salaries, allowances and pensions are made by a third party, as at Westminster. We believe the current situation is wrong and should end.”

So if the seat is unlikely to change hands this time round, if the UCU-NF are planning a two phase play then neither Stoker nor McGimpsey make sense. The one new party player that had been in the frame, Paula Bradshaw, is now believed out of the running. But as the Tories’ battleground director Marion Little told Slugger earlier this year:

“This is not about one election. We need candidates who will speak to all parts of society. We’ve seen success in England come over two election cycles from candidates who were prepared to get down and connect with people outside traditional Conservative voting communities”

That leaves us with the possibility that McCann is the unlikely dark horse that breaks through the middle. It would be a risky strategy… One, because by backing an unknown it risks the DUP gaining incumbency first, ie before McCann has had time to get his feet under some of the more prosperous tables of south Belfast.

And two, it would be predicated on the far from proven assumption that the legendary Garden Centre Prod (those 150k who came out to vote yes in the referendum, but whom appear to have given up on politics ever since) will respond positively to the opportunity to vote for a post sectarian choice in a seat with a significant slice of wealthy Catholic middle class residents…

And yet, stranger things have happened at sea… At the very least, McCann would be a credible fulfillment of the Conservative party’s promise to desectarianise its offering in Northern Ireland… And a decent litmus test for any other party foolish enough to want to try and break the bonds of our tribal past…

All good realistic stuff. Tim Lemon gave few hostages to fortune, but presaged his shortish speech with the honest remark that his party had been the only true and visible losers in the election. The internal review arising is thorough and ongoing.  Sean Kearney of Sinn Fein noticeably kept well away from his party’s performance and concentrated largely on the negative effects of recent electoral reform on voter turnout.

In the breakout group on politics and the media jointly chaired by Ciaran O’Kelly and Liz Fawcett led a spirited discussion between politicians and several members of the media. Both complained that the other was not sufficiently interested in issues, with one radio producer suggesting they’d had to manufacture a series of pieces on issues in the absence of any substantial response from parties. Politicians responded complaining that when the do put issue based material out, it is consistently ignored.

Even where PA, for instance, made efforts to garner issue material from each of the parties this resulted in poor take up from the wider media. One DUP representative hinted too that when policy material is presented to the media they often miss important difference in detail. A representative of another political party told the group he had had to resort to photo opps to get any interest from any of the media outlets.

It may be that without any significant means by which the local parties can formulate policy and drive it through the government machine - there is no real pull in locally written policy documents. However with both sides claiming the other is not listening, it may be time for the local media and politicians to get together and attempt to fill the communication gap?

It was the peace process, not the war, which was the undoing of the UUP. Initially it looked as though the UUP’s dominance was assured. The strategic shift in Irish republicanism, towards accepting British rule in Northern Ireland, provided an opportunity for the UUP to establish a new Unionism. The UUP polled well in the 1997 General Election, taking 10 Westminster seats and topping the poll at 32.7 per cent (compared with the DUP’s two seats and 13.6 per cent). The UUP was a key player in the negotiation that led to the signing of the Good Friday Peace Agreement in 1998, while the DUP (which took a ‘No concessions to Sinn Fein/IRA’ line) excluded itself from the negotiations and was treated as a pariah by the British government.

Fast forward to 2005 and we find that the UUP has been reduced to one Westminster seat with a Northern Ireland-wide vote of under 18 per cent, compared with the DUP’s nine seats and almost 34 per cent of the vote.

But he says the DUP’s victory

The DUP vote doesn’t indicate that Protestant voters have hardened in their attitudes towards Catholics, since the DUP position does not differ radically from that of the UUP. The DUP has not ruled out going into government with Sinn Fein; it has only said that it will not do so before IRA disarmament. Many Unionists thought they were voting for this ‘extreme’ position when they voted ‘Yes’ in the referendum on the 1998 peace agreement.
The DUP vote is an expression of discontent, alienation and a feeling of marginalisation among Unionists in Northern Ireland. People voted for the DUP not because their policies differ radically from the UUP’s, but because the DUP have articulated a sense of discontent and dissatisfaction. The DUP’s electoral gains, however, disguise the problems that the party is facing.

Which is basically political stasis.

Interesting parallels between battling teams and managers and one point that hasn’t had a lot of attention.

Similarly, the Sinn Fein vote in Derry increased dramatically two weeks ago – to a record high, in fact – and this while under media and political blitzkrieg from all quarters.

By Malachi O’Doherty

Last week’s elections have corrected the trajectory of Sinn Fein. The party has failed to take Derry. This is not a small matter. Derry was the birthplace of the Troubles. If Sinn Fein cannot overtake the SDLP there, either for the Westminster seat or for the Council, then that says there is something fundamentally wrong with the Sinn Fein project and its appeal to the people it purports to represent.

It also shows that Belfast and Derry are very different cities. Belfast is the real spiritual home of Sinn Fein. Belfast is a dark city with an industrial past, horrifically divided. Belfast’s sectarianism is more blatant. Catholics in Derry feel no threat to their sense of being Irish.

When Northern Ireland was closest to civil war in 1972, it was Belfast which took the brunt of it. It is only Belfast which is still haunted by the fear of a future sectarian civil war.

But there are other reasons why Sinn Fein failed to take Derry.

The Westminster candidate, Mitchel McLaughlin is older than Mark Durkan. The people of Derry do not see talent behind McLaughlin. He appears to be all that Sinn Fein has to offer to oppose a candidate who is young and brilliant and who actually plans to take his seat.

When you think of it, it is disheartening that so many did vote for Mitchel McLaughlin; it would have been an act of self- abasement on the part of the city if the majority had preferred him.

And now the question arises: why did Martin McGuinness not stand in Derry?

There had been speculation that he would swap campaigns with McLaughlin and throw his weight against Durkan.

Today, he is either wishing he had done that or he is relieved that the SDLP’s survival in Derry was not at the expense of the more senior Republican.

One of the common arguments against the SDLP was that it did not have a clear policy distinguishing it from Sinn Fein. It had been fighting Sinn Fein by mimicking Sinn Fein. And it is determined not to go back into the executive unless accompanied by Sinn Fein.

That means two things.

By one reading, it means that there is little point in voting for the SDLP if Sinn Fein is the real thing.

By another, it means that Sinn Fein stands to gain long-term advantage from any vote given to the SDLP.

The nationalists who want Sinn Fein to do well can help that party by voting for the SDLP, so long as the SDLP is committed to keeping the door open for Republicans into the executive.

In their current deadlock, an homogenous nationalist community behind Sinn Fein would probably just deepen Unionist fears and make agreement even more difficult.

Sinn Fein, tarnished by the Northern Bank robbery and the Robert McCartney murder, may still have a better chance of finding its way back into the executive with the aid of a mediator, as in the past.

But there is also now clear water between Sinn Fein and the SDLP. It is now plain that the SDLP stands for something which Sinn Fein does not. That something is participation in Westminster and on the policing board.

Had Sinn Fein succeeded in virtually eradicating the SDLP, it would be equipped to say today that nationalists in Northern Ireland have rejected the imperial parliament and rejected the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Its abstention from both would have been virtually uncontested within the nationalist political community.

The success of three SDLP candidates and the survival of the SDLP in Derry, as the majority party on the city council, denies Sinn Fein that prospect.

Now policing and participation will be at the heart of the debate about the future of nationalism.

Sinn Fein will seek to have its MPs admitted to the Dail and given voting rights there. This will be resisted, and an energetic campaign will follow. But now, Sinn Fein will have to deal with the SDLP’s willingness to participate.

Expect to see them pointing the finger at SDLP MPs and accusing them of undermining the national project.

But there is another danger for Sinn Fein. So far, it has led the nationalist community on issues short of the full claim for Irish sovereignty over Northern Ireland. To move further now, it must move on to the ground of the sovereignty question in a much more assertive way. How many nationalists will follow?

It may be that Sinn Fein has peaked. At the next Westminster election, it may take South Down but it is very likely to lose Fermanagh South Tyrone. By then, it will need to have established a new, more credible, candidate in Derry, to fight a Mark Durkan who will hopefully have distinguished himself in parliament by then and won the point that it is worth going there.

Of course, the SDLP will probably lose South Belfast in 2008.

And, much depends on whether the assembly will return. If it does, the DUP will probably insist on a new election to it, to finish off the Ulster Unionists’ chances of getting ministerial positions.

Since the return of the Assembly executive depends on Sinn Fein establishing its credibility with all other parties, and particularly with the DUP, the odds are massively against it.

Political reality will dictate that, for Sinn Fein to grow further politically, it will have to grow more like the SDLP, taking its seats in Westminster, taking its seats on the policing board, acknowledging that Northern MPs have no seats of right in Dublin, and impressing the electorate with its competence and sense of responsibility.

The question for the electorate then will be whether to settle for the real SDLP or to buy more of this new SDLP lite.

Party membership, for example, is plummeting, and party loyalty a much more fluid affair than it was a generation ago. Nowhere was this trend starker than in the plethora of tactical voting sites. Rather than putting a cross in the same box as last time, voters have been using the net to make a choice based on other factors: the likelihood of it making a difference, the past record of the candidates (regardless of their manifesto pledges), or to prioritise specific issues, especially Iraq.

It is tempting to characterise this kind of voting as the consumerisation of politics, but that trend is better reflected in the limited but depressing phenomenon of votes for sale, illegally, on the auction website eBay. By contrast, online strategic voting and vote swapping is far more passionate and dedicated, as with the massively popular voting advice websites we have been looking at, like Who Should You Vote For? and The Public Whip.

It comes as no surprise that senior members of the Ulster Unionist Party are considering the possibility of a ‘corporate leadership’ scheme to see the party through the next few months.  And it comes as no surprise, because it is typical of the arrogance, the debilitating culture of ‘we know better than you’, and the ear-stopping indifference to the views of others, which has brought this party to its knees. The UUP needs a new and clearly identifiable leader. It needs a new regime at the centre.

And Kane is adamant that what is needed inside the party is clarity. He lists a number of key questions:

- Who appointed and then re-appointed the advertising company responsible for the party’s campaign material?

- Who gave the thumbs up to the ‘Simply British’, ‘Decent People’ and Red Bus disasters?

- Who are the members of the election campaign committee and what part did they really play in the campaign?

- Who was responsible for the leaflets and newspaper advertisements published by ‘Concerned Ulster Unionists’ and ‘Concerned Citizens For A Better Future’?

- On whose information, research and statistics was the party relying when it boasted that our vote and seats would increase?

- What are the full financial consequences of our electoral losses? How much money did the campaign, the mini-manifestos, the pre-election leaflets etc cost?  Who authorised it? Where did the money come from?

- Who, exactly, provides money for the UUP?

- And, most important of all, who made the key decisions in all of these areas?

This means that after the election documentary information is in existence which will disclose who voted for which particular party in the constituency. The count by the returning officer’s officials leaves all votes for each candidate in separate bundles, which are then placed in paper sacks with special labels and seals supplied by Her Majesty’s Stationary Office and forwarded to the Clerk of the Crown in London.

It is possible for the serial numbers of these ballot papers to be matched against those retained on the counterfoil stubs which disclose the electoral registration number—and therefore name and address of citizens and how they voted—which are similarly forwarded to the Clerk of the Crown in London. Copies of electoral registers are already available on computerised disk, and in the future computerised counting of ballot papers by means of electronic vote counting machines is likely to replace manual counting of votes.

If computers now in existence are able to read numbers on stacks of papers, then the technology for speedy cross-referencing and making such political inquiries is already with us. It seems that computerised matching and print-outs of entire lists of voters for each party is now perfectly possible. It may or may not be far-fetched to conjecture that at some point in the future an oppressive government or its over-zealous officials might surreptitiously wish to find out the name and address of all “dissidents” who voted against them at a general election, but if so the bundles of ballot papers and counterfoil stubs retained by the Clerk of the Crown are available for analysis to produce the necessary information. Of course the law prohibits such inquiries, but the practical reality is that compliance with and enforcement of the law ultimately depends upon the various interested agencies of government themselves.

The ostensible argument for putting the voter’s electoral registration number on the counterfoils of ballot papers is said to be that it facilitates investigations into alleged electoral offences, such as multiple voting and impersonation, so as to decide whether a fresh election needs to be ordered by the Election Court.

However, vote-tracing hardly helps in the detection and prevention of any offence in itself, for there is no way that the identity of the impersonator can be discovered from the ballot paper. Investigations of such electoral fraud, involving voters finding out when they arrive at the polling station that their name has already been ticked off the electoral register by the clerk, can rely upon the evidence of the polling clerk that a ballot paper has indeed already been handed to some impersonator—tracing the ballot paper itself is not necessary.

The case for recording voters’ registration numbers on the ballot counterfoils therefore is a weak one and cannot outweigh a growing public concern at the risk to the secrecy of the ballot. The regulations contained in the Representation of the People Act limiting the legal circumstances in which the information may be retrieved may be sufficient as rules themselves, but guaranteeing actual compliance with the rules in the real world raises more complex questions; for whilst the information to discover how individual citizens voted continues to be stored, the potential for their misuse remains. The practice of writing voters’ electoral registration numbers—or entering any other note which might disclose a voter’s personal identity—on the counterfoils of ballot papers should be expressly abolished by law.

He points out that:

“....the taking of 92 seats by the SDLP (up to that point), just 28 short of the Sinn Féin total at the same point, shows they will feature strongly in any new elections for the Northern Assembly. So, too, will the Ulster Unionists, provided they decide quickly on a new leader and get someone likeable and electable. Sylvia Hermon would be that, but she has a major disability in terms of unionist politics - she is a woman.

He comes varying conclusions of the desireablity of competition, firstly within Unionism:

The fact that there remains competition on the unionist side makes that all the more difficult, for the DUP and Ulster Unionists will fight Assembly elections on the basis of which is the tougher party

.

And then Nationalism:

Competition on the unionist side is a complication; competition on the nationalist side is a must. This is because competition on the nationalist side will drive politics towards the centre. Sinn Féin did well in these elections but not spectacularly so. It had wanted to wipe out the SDLP at its leadership level and at its grass roots. Neither has happened. The success of Mark Durkan in Foyle is hugely significant for it retains its leadership; the success of the party in the local elections retains its base.

And the element many pundits thought was buried on the 18th March:

Someone said in Belfast recently that before the Northern Bank robbery and the Robert McCartney murder, Sinn Féin could not miss a shot, like Steve Davis in his prime. But like Steve Davis as he passed his prime, they started missing shots and, after a while, couldn’t make a shot. Anyway, it has thrown Sinn Féin off its stride and probably contributed to Gerry Adams making his hugely significant plea to the IRA to go away.

Upper Bann SDLP MLA Dolores Kelly claims that, during voting on Thursday, Sinn Fein was illegally smuggling out of pollings stations the names of nationalists who had not been ticked off the electoral registers after voting. Mrs Kelly fears people who had not voted then received visits from republicans, asking them to go and vote, as she has seen happen before. A spokesman for the Electoral Office said they strongly suspected the practice went on and they called it “absolutely illegal”.

His analysis accords with that of the departing UUP leader:

There is no strategy for peace or indeed a process. It has all become a form of cheap bartering with the natives. To borrow Dr Paisley’s words, if Mr Trimble faced the ‘rope’ this week, it was a rope provided by the British government.

Curiously, Durkan says that he wants to get the North South Interparliamentary Forum and the North South Consultative Forum set up as “[t]hose will provide natural and organic realignment over time, realignment that will express itself in terms that are not about blunt mergers.”

And noting the support the SDLP received from politicians in the Republic, Durkan added:

“We are proud of and welcome the support and endorsement of Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and Labour and we want to work with those parties in reconvening the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation on the issue of Irish unity.

What? No mention for the PDs?

*snigger*

The BBC reported that there may have been a ‘McConville factor’ that helped dampen Sinn Fein chances. Did the SDLP play the ‘criminality card’ much in Derry? If so, is that perceived reaction any indication of greater opposition within nationalism (in Derry, at least) to paramilitary and related criminal activity?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. But if it is, maybe Durkan should have mentioned Michael McDowell in his ‘thank you’ list.

After all - if he hadn’t challenged Sinn Fein’s Derry candidate Mitchel McLaughlin in a TV debate on whether Jean McConville’s killing was a murder or not, Durkan might not be in the same, possibly even stronger, position - in Derry, at least.

* * *

...anyone think McDonnell benefited from any ‘McCartney effect’? Or was it a case of unionists voting tactically?

The Devenny vote has been described by some as “holding up well in very difficult circumstances”, although Alliance might disagree.

Maskey’s share of the vote rose by 1.4 percent in South Belfast since 2001’s general election, and the actual number of votes was almost identical. But it was still more than 1,000 less than he got in the Assembly election in 2003.

McDonnell’s share of the vote rose by 1.7 percent since he last stood for Westminster. It was down about a 1,000 on that 2001 General Election, but up by more than 3,000 votes since the Assembly 2003 poll, when they got a 23% share.

And why isn’t Spotlight on the BBC website?! Argh!

He argues that Trimble was let down by two groups:

One was the unionist middle and professional class who came out to vote for the Agreement in the referendum, then retired to their leafy suburbs, denying him the support he needed to build a strong pro-Agreement assembly party. The other group was the republicans, who denied him the prize of decommissioning, to which he thought they had committed themselves in the Agreement, and which would have enabled him to quieten the sceptics in his own party.

As for the latter, Hayes believes that the price of settlement may be going up:

SINN Fein will find that the price has been raised considerably by Trimble’s successors, and a weakened Tony Blair may have less time and appetite for the affairs of Northern Ireland.

  DUP Steamroller

But the truth is that compared to the complexity of the tasks facing his predecessors, Hain has, constitutionally at least, a comparatively straightforward job to undertake. The primary one will be to convince the DUP that Sinn Fein has jumped the required bar in order to be allowed to share democratic control of policing and justice.

Privately the DUP is now talking down the possibility of a deal that would draw Sinn Fein into a comprehensive deal.