A stiff warning to the DUP that “what got us here is not going to keep us here.”…

…they are no substitute for a small number of strong local connections.

-Benjamin Allen, researcher at the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard

I was asked on Nolan yesterday to comment on Lee Reynolds analytical piece in The Critic magazine (brutally titled “Unionism has to wise up”), timed no doubt ahead of this weekend’s DUP party conference and the new leader’s first big set piece speech.

The focus was consideration of a name change, to signal to the Northern Irish public that the party is under the management of a new generation and has a mission broader than merely defending a Union that’s no longer under sustainable attack.

But as we have seen in the past branding is a tricky business and you can (as the UUP found under the UCU-NF coalition with the Tories in 2010) that just swapping names above the shop can lead to terminal confusion in your traditional voter base.

What Reynolds is calling for is more of a transformation in both how the party does its business and in its general outlook rather than the kind of cosmetic changes that have seen other projects like NI21 crash and burn almost as quickly as they began.

He reminds us of what most pundits (and politicians) forget: ie, that Democracy is a ground up operation. This is largely because journalism (have been cleaned out by the new, global social media monopolies) no longer has a ground up capacity.

There are lessons in there not simple for the DUP’s new leadership and members but for most parties in Northern Ireland and indeed, as I made clear yesterday, across the UK, the US and mainland Europe, suffering from a hollowing of party systems.

In the second of ten points Reynolds notes a certain kind of solipsistic view of the DUP’s place in the world, which perhaps was an occupational hazard of its former twenty year long incumbency as the top party in Northern Ireland…

…we need to get over ourselves. As had the UUP, we have fallen into the trap of essentialism. Unionism is the DUP and the DUP is Unionism. One cannot survive without the other. Northern Ireland being part of the United Kingdom would attract around 60-65 per cent support in a referendum and its various parties attract support in the low forties. It survived the fall of the UUP, and it could survive ours.

A trait this belief in DUP indispensability encourages is self-obsession. If you see yourself as essential, this elevates internal psychodramas to a significance they just do not have. It bores and repulses voters. In communications, it led to the belief that the world can wait until we are ready to hand the tablets down from the mountain top. This produced A messaging vacuum which was filled maliciously by our opponents. [Emphasis added]

Again, I can think of other parties to whom this also applies but who have never had anyone within their own ranks stand up to disrupt this sort of introspective navel gazing that will afflict any party which stops putting the concerns of its voters first.

In point seven he hits the nail on the head. One caller to Nolan complained that the party never listens to its working class base any more, a particular problem for the DUP which has been under performing turnout wise there for many years:

…de-centralise power. The answer to the loss of a leviathan [Peter Robinson] is not to shoehorn someone into being the new leviathan. The Deputy Leader position is empty. The party rules should be changed to have two — one from the parliamentary and assembly groups respectively. The Assembly Deputy Leader would take on a new role of Director of Campaigns to lead re-engagement with voters in between elections (and thus should not be a Minister). A proactive Party Chair is needed. Party Officers should no longer be the sole preserve of the parliamentary and assembly parties. The Director of Elections should not be held by anyone in ministerial office and preferably not in full-time elected office. [Emphasis added]

This may sound dry and technocratic, but it speaks to the sclerotic condition that most parties suffer from to one degree or another in this digital age where the number of face to face encounters in member organisations is dropping like a stone.

It’s all about the plumbing stupid. In point eight he advocates for the creation of a senior officer (general secretary) who’s job it is to look after the health of the party as it decentralises:

The Chief Executive model has not delivered the depth and breadth of internal change needed or promised. It should shift to a separation of roles with a general secretary to focus on party structures and fundraising and a new Party Chief of Staff focused on policy, communications, and political coordination, chosen by the Party Leader.

This year two political scientists (Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld) published a book which brilliantly covers exactly this problem of organisational sclerosis. They even describe themselves as partisans of party. It’s called The Hollow Parties:

Hollowness matters because parties matter. When vigorous and civically rooted parties link the governed with their government while schooling citizens in the unending give and take of political engagement, they give legitimacy to democratic rule. They bring blocs of voters together under a common banner, negotiating priorities among competing interests to construct agendas that resonate in the electorate.

In the States the sclerosis arises, they argue from the undue focus on elections to the top job (ie, the Presidency) which is a quadrennial event, which means that other engagements take a lesser place in the priorities of the two major parties.

This is definitely the case with the DUP, whose clever wheeze of getting the whole electorate to focus to the exclusion of all else on what is now the quinquennial contest over who is going to be First Minister (which has no more power than a DFM).

Focus on real voters would have the effect of enervating the party’s dead cat narratives by drawing perspectives in from the edge, and help it leave behind what Reynolds terms the word games and parsing that makes public perception worse.

The point it tried to make yesterday is how electorates change faster than they have ever, while membership organisations like unions and political parties need to retrench closer to reality rather than chasing abstractions [Like, ahem, Brexit? – Ed].

He closes with the following:

After the 2019 election, the party undertook an in-depth analysis of the University of Liverpool’s Northern Ireland survey of election voters. The PowerPoint closed with the warning that “What got us here is not going to keep us here.” It is truer in 2024 than it was then. Inaction is decline. Action is growth. It is time to act.

It will be instructive to see if the DUP engages with this more positive, outward looking agenda. It’s one thing to have good ideas, but it’s quite another to get to where they get implemented. Culture, as they say, eats strategy for breakfast.

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty