As Colum Eastwood step downs as SDLP leader, will the next leader be any better?

The Irish News’s John Manley breaks the news that Colum Eastwood is to step down as only the sixth leader of the SDLP since its establishment in 1970. It comes just over week after his UUP counterpart Doug Beattie also announced his departure.

At first he put a brake on his party’s decline but in the 2022 Assembly election it suffered a huge anti DUP squeeze from Sinn Féin to which neither Eastwood nor his party had an answer. Now they’re the smallest multimember party, with eight MLAs.

Whoever his successor is will (like the UUP) have a huge job on their hands. S/he will need to build a coalition between two internal tendencies within its voter base: social conservatives largely in the rural west/south and more urban social democrats.

To create a project capable of containing the two requires a vision of an island reconciled rather than continuing the party’s long whinge at or about SF’s success, or jumping on the unity next Tuesday week bandwagon that’s clearly going nowhere fast.

If you don’t believe me then note that Phillip McGuinness in The Irish Times yesterday (Wednesday) observes how “opinion polls show that, since 2021, support for reunification in the North is falling”. Populist success is seceding to long term failure.

Nationalist voters need a credible alternative to the listlessness of outrage politics (mostly at unionists whom the GFA compels them to coalesce with) that’s provided no material gains to those who need it most, not another group of clever critics.

Newton Emerson didn’t miss and hit the wall when he noted that Northern Ireland was prospering in spite of the lack leadership from the political class in Northern Ireland. And this is a bigger problem for nationalists than unionists.

The lack of activism in government means that as inward investment builds in the east, Derry and Strabane subsist on too few public sector jobs. Catholic students now leave for British Unis in bigger numbers than their Protestants counterparts.

The much vaunted differential in educational outcomes of Protestant working class boys is tiny compared to those their Catholic working class counterparts. How, year after year, do we manage to ignore broken promises to fix the NI housing crisis?

These issues all disproportionately affect single identity nationalist areas. It has been something of a mystery that none of the SDLP’s post Belfast Agreement leaders have been able to offer an intellectually honest alternative on these inveterate problems?

Hint: the long whinge about how it is all the unionists fault is quietly losing you moderate, cross community votes guys.

There’s no point in just going all anti everything SF stands for either. The next leader, if they are to reverse the party’s long term decline, must seek out a growth curve. For that they will have to start talking about the world where ordinary people live.

And offering a better choice than they’ve been offered in twenty five years of peace…

“The goals of a system can radically alter its behaviour. Here, note the immense difference between a fishery driven by a “catch as much as you can” goal as opposed to one driven by a goal of sustaining healthy fish stocks for the long term.”
— David Macaulay

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