Sinn Féin faces into #GE2019 with an odd “non-abstentionism-by-proxy” policy of uncertain returns

Having signed up to the civic nationalism letter recently, Fintan O’Toole speculates on the possibility that Jeremy Corbyn might offer Sinn Féin (who if you believe polls, is now starting to lose ground in Northern Ireland as well as the south):

It starts with what at first glance looks like a decent question:

The offer is this: take your seats to vote me into office and support me on any confidence motions, and in return I will give you a Border poll. Does Sinn Féin really rule out such a deal? And if not, it surely needs to be honest with voters and prepare them in advance for the possibility that the policy of abstentionism is not as absolute as party dogma has always claimed it to be.

I know, of course, what Sinn Féin’s immediate answer to the question will be: we don’t do hypotheticals. But everything about UK politics is hypothetical right now. Every objective observer accepts that the electorate is more volatile than it has been for generations.

He further notes, that despite the polls currently favouring Johnson by some way:

A binary first-past-the-post system now has four major parties squeezing into it. Small shifts could produce momentous results. Nobody knows how many voters will decide to vote tactically. Nobody knows anything.

A guess that is as good (and as bad) as anyone else’s is that Boris Johnson either wins big or not at all. He is gambling everything on one throw of the dice: that “get Brexit done” will deliver a slew of Labour seats in the coastal towns, the midlands and the north of England, easily offsetting his likely losses in Scotland, the southwest and London.

The likelihood is that if this gamble pays off, it will be a jackpot – those Labour seats, if they fall at all, will fall like dominoes. But if they don’t, what then?

However, the sweet pocket for Sinn Féin is now much smaller and less exclusively theirs than it would have been had they taken their seats two years ago and enjoyed the fun (and notoriety) of messing with Tory plans for an extreme Brexit.

Fintan argues that “Corbyn is effectively a Sinn Féin fellow traveller”. Now, that may be true (it certainly was once upon a time, when he was a backbencher), but his party at large is certainly not.

Going against the Belfast Agreement (ie, without concrete demographic evidence) to pay off just one party in an arrangement that might only hold to the extent of getting Brexit sorted would hardly be worth the complications that would arise in other febrile parts of the UK.

Such grave constitutional matters would rest solely on the Labour Party leader’s slender shoulders. After nine years out of office, neither he nor his party can afford to be quite so cavalier with what’s likely to be his only opportunity to gain real power.

It’s not simply that he would have bigger fish to fry but that, barring disaster, the DUP having greater numbers, as Newton has pointed out, now have no incentive to join with the Conservatives to thwart Corbyn’s plan to subject a moderate all-UK deal to plebiscite.

Towards the end he does make a good point worth tagging onto the end, on the strange logic of where Sinn Féin now finds itself:

Last week the party announced it would not stand in South Belfast, East Belfast and North Down and urged its voters in those constituencies to support Remain candidates instead.

This is a welcome concession to political reality, but it also creates a very strange logic. In calling on voters in three constituencies to vote for candidates who would in fact take their seats, Sinn Féin is saying that what happens in Westminster after the election is of vital interest to those voters.

In those three constituencies, the party is saying Brexit trumps everything else and every seat in the House of Commons may be crucial. But not, apparently, in the other 15 constituencies, where voters are expected to support Sinn Féin candidates who will then do nothing with their seats.

This makes no sense whatsoever. It amounts to abstentionism for some voters and non-abstentionism-by-proxy for others.

Westminster Bridge, London” by Arran Bee is licensed under CC BY

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