Letter: Realising benefits of a strong Labour Party would have required joined up strategic thinking

Have they been a series of strategic Wallys, who, as Wally would have put it, ‘you basically hallucinate about the future and then something different happens’?

As Walker argues, Craig wanted a moderate nationalist ‘Devlinite’ opposition in Stormont and to achieve this he abolished PR in the 1920s. This act was designed to reduce the power of unionist independents and cross-community Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) representation and consolidate the unionist bloc.

He succeeded in keeping Northern Ireland a virtually Labour Party free zone, at great cost in inter-community relations. But, as a result, the moderate nationalism of his dreams metamorphosed into the modern Sinn Fein.

Then, when the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) was starting to make headway in the 1960s and was attracting the votes of large numbers of both Catholics and Protestants, Prime Minister Terence O’Neill, like James Craig before him, decided that the Unionist Party’s strategic priority was to target the cross-community NILP.

He achieved this at the cost of the rise of single community Catholic parties, first the SDLP and more recently Sinn Fein.

The less that is said about the unionist leadership’s strategic acumen over Brexit, the better. You could be forgiven for thinking they were on magic mushrooms.

Unionist leaders over the years have been incapable of realising that a strong cross-community Labour Party generating good community relations would actually be in Northern Ireland’s interest, particularly given that our future is in the hands of the broader public in a border poll. That would have required joined up strategic thinking.

Boyd Black, Secretary, Labour Party in Northern Ireland (LPNI)