The DUP must win over the unaligned centre ground to secure the union, leader Gavin Robinson has warned his party. The first response from much of Northern Ireland might be: “not another unionism-at-the-crossroads speech”.
Former DUP leader Peter Robinson (no relation) delivered a similar conference address in 2011. UUP leaders have been saying much the same since the 1960s. All watched unionism slide in the opposite direction.
The difference this time is that unionism has lost its majority, as Robinson bluntly admitted. That made his speech significant – it was delivered to party members in North Antrim two weeks ago but has been kept out of the headlines by Sinn Féin scandals.
“We cannot ignore the new realities we face,” he said, referring to an opinion poll showing support for the union dropping below 50 per cent for the first time, to 48.6 per cent.
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“Unionism must win the minds, if not the hearts, of the ‘don’t knows’.”
Robinson’s strategy for this is practical delivery at Stormont.
“We can use the tools available to us to improve the lives of people here,” he said, citing new childcare benefits as an example of keeping a manifesto promise. The DUP controls departments responsible for education, welfare and housing.
But even glittering policy success would no longer be enough. The DUP has fallen to second place at Stormont, so it no longer benefits from the appearance of being in charge. Many people receiving their childcare benefit will vaguely assume they have Michelle O’Neill to thank for it.
The Sinn Féin First Minister has been scrupulous in acknowledging that she shares a joint office with DUP Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly. This tends to come across more as Sinn Féin magnanimity than as equality. Robinson is based in Westminster, complicating attempts to present his party as leading at Stormont.
So, seizing the agenda requires gestures as well as actions. O’Neill supplied a demonstration on Tuesday, announcing she will be the first senior Sinn Féin figure to attend an official Remembrance Sunday service in Belfast.
SDLP leaders have been doing this for years but the awkward truth is that outreach makes more impact the farther you are from the centre. That gives the DUP a comparable advantage to Sinn Féin.
Robinson’s emphasis on practical delivery bypasses the question of what DUP outreach would look like. Avoiding the question was presumably intentional, as the party has always struggled to answer it.
The unionist equivalent of O’Neill’s gesture might be attending an Easter Rising commemoration in Dublin. No unionist leader has ever done this and any DUP attendance would now appear to be following Sinn Féin’s lead.
Many DUP figures feel they are unfairly maligned on outreach, as the party’s ministers do attend GAA matches, meet Irish presidents and engage with countless other nationalist organisations. However, they rarely do so with trailblazing confidence. Little-Pengelly manages it well enough. Almost everyone else looks like they are swallowing a wasp.
Cynics suspect Sinn Féin is trying to distract from its recent scandals with O’Neill’s Tuesday announcement. If so, her party’s approach to being in trouble is to make a dramatic cross-community gesture. That is never the DUP’s approach. Its eternal unwillingness to upset unionist hardliners has been bolstered by the electoral threat of the Traditional Unionist Party (TUV), a party that owes its rise to the DUP’s mishandling of Brexit. It is no coincidence that Robinson delivered his speech in North Antrim, a seat Ian Paisley jnr sensationally lost to the TUV in July’s general election. The TUV cannot complain about childcare benefits but it would cry treason if Little-Pengelly turned up at Arbour Hill.
Impressing the centre ground requires triangulation between left and right as much as between orange and green. The DUP is ideally placed to make gestures of this type, as it recognises the limited appeal of its religious and conservative foundations. Robinson is moving the party leftward on economic issues. The DUP ran its first openly gay candidate in 2019 and reconciled this quite easily as respecting individual liberty. However, this is not something the party has developed further. It gives the impression of modernising at minimum speed, while being constantly tempted by conservative culture-war positions.
In 2011, basic competency at Stormont and an occasional grand gesture would have transformed the DUP’s prospects. Now it must work far harder merely to get the centre ground’s attention. But the task is not impossible and it would be pushing at an open door. Northern nationalism’s overall vote is stagnant and it has hitched its fate to Sinn Féin, a party at least as problematic as the DUP. Alliance’s vote has peaked, while the same poll Robinson cited found two-thirds of Alliance voters support the union.
It is not too late for the DUP to become the party it knows it has to be. But there is still no sign it can make that transformation.