Hanna: If we keep voting for the same politics, we shouldn’t be surprised when we keep getting the same outcomes.

Claire Hanna MP is the Leader of the SDLP

For too long, politics here has spent most of its time either looking to the past or dealing with the present, but rarely planning for the future.

Reduced Assembly terms have followed the same predictable pattern: very little government legislation for much of the mandate, followed by blind panic as an election approaches, with legislation accelerated through without the scrutiny it needs and deserves.

Throw in a crisis or two to keep the focus off delivery, and you have the familiar playbook for how government works in Northern Ireland.
For our part, the SDLP hasn’t always been able to cut through with the “he’s behind you” refrain as the same familiar plot unfolds. The electorate had caught on to the script, but too often they didn’t see the SDLP as the people who could do anything about it.

Recognising the problem alone isn’t enough. God knows plenty of people were only too happy to point it out to us in case we missed it.
People rightly want to know: what are you going to do about it? Can they trust you to deliver? And aren’t them politicians all the same anyway?

Over the past year, I have been on a road trip around the north, talking and listening to communities about what they want for their futures. Are they happy with the status quo? Is Stormont working for them? Do they believe in a united Ireland?

You don’t need me to tell you that most people aren’t seeing government improve their lives. In too many cases, they are on the receiving end of worsening outcomes.

Young people can’t get a house in the village they grew up in and want to stay in, priced out of the market or sitting on a waiting list for a social home they will never have enough points for. Others are waiting for treatment: seven years of pain waiting on a hip replacement, or months passing with no sign of the mental health support their GP said they needed. Children are going without the support they need in school because there aren’t enough classroom assistants, while others are growing up in homes where there isn’t enough money to put food on the table.

As the Official Opposition, the SDLP is determined to show that politics can change outcomes.

We aren’t in government. We are small in number and, no, we didn’t win enough seats to be in government – like Opposition parties the world over. But there is a real need and purpose in holding the parties that do have that privilege to account. And Opposition has to be about more than simply pointing at what is going wrong.

We did that on Lough Neagh, bringing the Nutrients Action Programme back to the Assembly and forcing Sinn Féin to change its position. We pushed for and secured legislation on bus safety and helped secure the reinstatement of Irish language funding in schools through Scoil Spreagtha.

Sinéad McLaughlin is currently bringing forward a substantial piece of legislation through the Regional Balance Bill, which would put a duty on government departments to support inclusive growth beyond Belfast. On institutional reform, when commentators told us we were wasting our time, we secured majority support in the Assembly on two occasions and have been relentless in making the case to the UK and Irish Governments. Now the issue is firmly on the Secretary of State’s agenda and he has committed to act.

Presently, we are five months into the financial year with no Budget. Anywhere else, that would be making headlines every day. This isn’t a theory or an accounting quirk. It has real consequences for public services already struggling to cope, and the longer it goes on, the worse those consequences become.

And before you @ me, two things can be true at once: Northern Ireland can be underfunded and our Executive can do a much better job with the money it already has. We don’t need our own government paddling us further up Sh!t Creek.

But klaxon alert! Just in time, another distraction presents itself.

The disastrous handling of the Parades Commission ruling has provided the latest issue around which to wedge the big parties as election mode takes hold. It has reopened a painful period in our recent history and provided a dog whistle for the trusty old fear-and-division campaign.

That is not to diminish the very real and genuine concerns of Garvaghy Road residents. But five days in a row on one prime-time radio programme, alongside live coverage of a press conference dedicated to one actor in the mix, feels entirely disproportionate when compared with the lack of rigour being applied to the fact that this place is operating without a Budget to fund vital services affecting every single person in our society.

And there it is again: the familiar playbook. Serious questions about government and delivery pushed to the side while politics retreats to the territory where the biggest parties are most comfortable.

They ask for your vote to govern, but appear unable or unwilling to do some of the most basic things a government is supposed to do. Set a Budget. Deliver infrastructure commitments – the A5, Casement. Fix things that are plainly broken – our health service, our water infrastructure, Lough Neagh.

None of them done.

The old saying is: why put off until tomorrow what you can do today? The Executive appears to have got today and tomorrow the wrong way round.

We have to call this mentality out, but we also have to shine a light on the bigger picture. We have seen this movie before and the ending risks getting worse unless we change the script. For the SDLP, that means proving that we are a party people can trust and, crucially, a party that can deliver.

We need to make this place work better in the here and now, for this generation. But doing that isn’t separate from our ambition for a New Ireland. It is part of how we demonstrate what that ambition is about.

We believe that unlocking the potential of Northern Ireland is one of the most important things we can do to build the case for the New Ireland that remains the SDLP’s vision for this island.

That doesn’t make our commitment to unity any less than anyone else’s. It means recognising that if you want to persuade people to build a new country with you, demonstrating that you are capable of governing is a pretty handy place to start.

It also means taking the conversation about unity beyond those who were born into a nationalist tradition. A New Ireland cannot simply be something nationalists persuade themselves is a good idea. It has to be capable of attracting people who don’t share our political tradition, who may never have considered themselves nationalist and who will quite reasonably want to know what is in it for them.

That requires consistency in our values. It means not equivocating when something doesn’t suit our political narrative and giving the whataboutery a miss.  If something is wrong when one side does it, it is wrong when the other side does it too.

Until we are prepared to acknowledge our own contribution to the stand-off that has defined politics here, we will struggle to convince people who don’t share our views that we are reasonable and accommodating, or that their identity, interests and aspirations will be respected in a different constitutional arrangement.

That isn’t always comfortable. But it is essential if we are serious about persuasion, serious about making unity genuinely inclusive and serious about building a New Ireland capable of helping this place finally reach its potential.

So, as my party heads into Conference this weekend, the choice we want to put to people is a fairly simple one.

Do we want more of the same? Short-term politics, institutions lurching from one crisis to another and another election fought on fear about what the other side might do?

Or do we want something different?

Stable institutions that can actually deliver what politicians promise. An Opposition prepared to hold power to account. A politics that spends more time thinking about where we are going than relitigating where we have been. And a conversation about a New Ireland that is confident enough to include people who don’t already agree with us.

Because if we keep voting for the same politics, we shouldn’t be surprised when we keep getting the same outcomes.

The SDLP’s job now is to prove there is an alternative.