Ben Lowry: There was little prospect of unionist unity at this election

Yet unionist unity, which so many supporters of the Union crave, is a distant prospect.

Why are the coming years going to be so challenging? And why has unionist unity gone off the radar?

There are four main challenges:

The rise of Sinn Fein, which was seen as inevitable until the recent local and European elections humiliation in the Republic. But an SF advance north of the border in this general election still seems likely

The decline in the appeal of unionism. While the nationalist share of the vote has barely changed in 25 years, up from, 39% of the vote in the 1998 Stormont election to just over 40% in the 2022 assembly contest, the unionist vote has declined slowly but relentlessly over that same time period from 51% to 40%

The gradual emergence, in scale, of the Irish Sea trade border

The election of a Labour government with little sympathy for unionists

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The challenges, however, are even greater than that list implies. So-called civic unionism, the sort of support from society that Sinn Fein is beginning to get from civic nationalism, as is recently evident in someone such as Pat Cullen, is minimal. This lack of support was apparent after Brexit, when unionism seemed hopelessly ill suited to respond to the challenges. The business community, which for so long had ties to unionism, gave no support to the efforts to see off an internal UK trade frontier. On the contrary, all the main representative groups, including the Ulster Farmers’ Union, gave at least implied support to the notion that keeping an open land frontier was the first imperative after the UK left the EU, rather than protecting our largest trade, with Great Britain. For all the many, many failures of the successive Tory administrations post the 2016 referendum, we would have had been in a far worse place without their (intermittent) support and muscle.

There is almost no sympathy towards unionism within the media, the legal world, within academia, and the arts. One opponent of a DUP return to Stormont said to me late last year that its restoration would be like Belfast City Council on steroids – and so it has proved. By that, I think this person was referring to the now inbuilt Alliance-SDLP-Green-Sinn Fein-People Before Profit political majority in both those buildings and other political bodies on a range of key issues. There is a consensus on woke identity issues, on belief in a massive government, on how to handle legacy of the Troubles (focusing on state failures), on Europe, on issues such as Gaza.

All of these cultural and bureaucratic forces in NI are contributing to a war of attrition against unionists. An example is what I describe as Belfast’s extremist and divisive Irish language policy, which is intended to put Gaelic signage all over the city.

The current Labour Party leadership is not interested in a border poll. That is the good news. The bad news is that it will probably not stand up to appalling Irish actions such as suing the UK over its handling of the legacy of the Troubles. In recent years London has begun to push back against that sort of anglophobia.

So why, in the face of all this, is there no unionist unity? At one end of unionism, there are influential Ulster Unionists who do not want a pact with the DUP, anywhere. Some of them feel no more affinity to that rival unionist party than they do to Alliance. And then there is another group within the UUP, probably larger, which would favour a DUP candidate over an Alliance one but which feels, quite genuinely, that if they stand down for the DUP – ever – they will lose liberal voters to Alliance. This helps explain why there is a UUP candidate in East Belfast despite the threat to Gavin Robinson. Some Ulster Unionists think it will draw off enough votes from Naomi Long to stop her winning.

This akin to an argument put forward by Chris McGimpsey on these pages a decade ago. He said that a single unionist party would merely gift 50,000 votes to Alliance.

To this very day, for all its supposed failures, the UUP tends to poll around 100,000 votes. These are people who have stubbornly refused to transfer their support to the DUP, no matter how much the latter party has changed since the days of the Rev Ian Paisley.

At the other end of unionism is the TUV. Its support is almost always dismissed by the great and the good, and the fact that it has only one Stormont seat is endlessly cited against it. But the party got almost 8% of the vote in the last Stormont election, more than Alliance did in most post 1998 MLA elections, and almost as much as Sinn Fein did in some 1980s elections.

And this was despite the fact that unionist voters were very mindful of the fact that failing to back the DUP could lead to an SF first minister. Such unionists feel real anger at the DUP talking tough but seeming always to compromise, even on major issues such as internal UK trade.

I have mentioned in this column before something that the late Jim Molyneaux, Ulster Unionist leader, said in an interview in the 1980s to an older boy at the school I attended. Asked about a single unionist party he said he opposed it, because the liberals and hardliners would leave, and consequently there would be three parties. Which was a prescient remark because the emergence of de facto single unionist party, the DUP, has indeed led to three parties.

If we went down to one, then now, more than ever, we would in fact entrench the three-party split. A single party would certainly see the overall unionist vote decline, which unionism cannot afford.

There are plenty of good candidates in the coming election and I hope that the overall unionist vote is strong. I feel that lack of morale will mean that many people stay home.

For now we are stuck with the three-way split. I suspect all three unionist parties will have their triumphs after the polls close on Thursday. And unionists will have to see how the votes fall, and plot a way forward from there.