WITH LESS THAN a week to go before people across the UK go to the polls to vote in the General Election, all shoulders are to the wheel in Northern Ireland in the battle for its 18 seats in Westminster; with a number of contests that are simply too close to call, this will be an exciting one to follow.
In East Belfast, the leaders of the Alliance Party and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), both having previously represented the constituency in Westminster, are entering a final push to secure re-election. In Lagan Valley, the Alliance Party and the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) are vying to claim the once-safe seat of the DUP’s former leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson.
In North Down, the UUP and independent (former DUP) candidate Alex Easton are battling to unseat Alliance’s Stephen Farry, while in North Belfast, the DUP is hoping to regain its seat from Sinn Féin. And, as ever, the UK’s most marginal constituency in Fermanagh and South Tyrone will see Sinn Féin and the UUP – an agreed unionist ‘unity candidate’ – contest a seat that has previously been determined by votes in single figures, and only 57 in the most recent General Election in 2019.
Against this backdrop, a succession of extended interviews with party leaders and two televised debates have occurred over the last few weeks.
These have been important opportunities for the parties to amplify their campaigning efforts and to reach the wider electorate in a way that canvassing and publishing manifestos simply cannot. So, it is curious that the most recent of these – billed as the ‘NI Leaders’ Debate’ and scheduled in a primetime slot – only featured three party leaders out of its five participants.
The UUP sent its deputy leader, Robbie Butler, and Sinn Féin chose Chris Hazzard, its Westminster team lead. This is the second time that both have opted against fielding their leaders when taking part in a multi-party television debate in this campaign – only a few days previously Butler and John Finucane respectively represented their parties in UTV’s election debate.
This alone set an uneasy tone for the debate from the outset. It was the source of several digs from other panellists and uncomfortable questions about why they, and not their party leaders, were there. When probed about it, Hazzard noted Michelle O’Neill was absent due to canvassing commitments, while Butler reiterated that he is deputy leader of his party.
In the heat of an election, the reality is that this was most likely a strategic decision for both parties to showcase these individuals who are also candidates in the election (their respective leaders are not). The other party leaders who attended are also candidates, so in a sense, this created something of an even playing field for all the participants – however, the equaliser was supposed to be that the participants were all party leaders.
The inescapable consequence of this is that focus on who was (or was not) present is the story of the night, and not what was said or discussed in the debate itself. Nobody dropped the ball or came away with reason to be especially concerned about their performance; nobody digressed from the well-established and known party lines, so there were no surprises in terms of content.
For a debate ahead of an election to Westminster, this one could easily have been confused for one ahead of an Assembly election. The topics covered in the hour-long debate included health, trust in politicians, the constitutional question, Brexit, and if taking a side in Middle East politics is another form of identity politics – a wide-ranging discussion, but one that ended up focusing for the most part on devolved matters. At times, the Westminster element of the election became obfuscated in debate about Stormont.
On the one hand, this was a clear demonstration of how intertwined discussions are on devolved matters and Westminster elections. How the parties perform in the Assembly shapes how they are viewed when it comes to Westminster elections to a much greater degree than is the case vice versa. However, it also made it difficult for the panellists to find the space to articulate how they would set about achieving their goals in Westminster; indeed, the extent to which these goals were communicated was constrained such was the extent of focus on Stormont at points.
In terms of Brexit – which has been conspicuously absent from campaigns elsewhere in the UK compared to Northern Ireland – the responses of the parties reinforced that this is an issue that will continue to shape politics here for the foreseeable. Enmeshed with the wider constitutional question, as well as concerns about the stability of Northern Ireland’s political institutions in light of the region’s specific post-Brexit arrangements, this is a key issue for the parties.
A question from the audience about how trust could be regained in politicians after years of political breakdown served as a stark reminder to the panellists if needed, that the ramifications of institutional collapse related to Brexit have extended far beyond optics. This in itself could make the difference on polling day in those more marginal seats.
It was audience contributions that elevated this debate from being about party positions on issues to being about the here and now, with interjections bringing a levity to the discussion that pushed panellists to contextualise their party lines and justify their standpoints – a difficult feat when there were points that the debate fell to exchanges of sharp and personal comments, and came close to descending into constituency-based hustings.
Inevitably, attention quickly turned to who the strongest and weakest performers were on the night, with social media awash with party activists proclaiming how their leader outshone the others. Let’s be fair, there was a disparity in how each performed, but none will have had reason to come away feeling like they let their side down.
Ultimately, the party lines would have been the same regardless of who was present to deliver them, but the optics of two parties deciding against sending their leader to do it is where the damage exists. Neither could land messages with the same gravitas as the others present with the focus not on what they were saying but why they were the ones saying it.
Dr Clare Rice is a Northern Irish academic and political analyst.
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