Ben Lowry: Some unionists think that Labour will be better for Northern Ireland's place in the UK, but I doubt it

Prior to the DUP’s sudden u-turn in February, it had seemed that Sir Jeffrey Donaldson was unable to get his deal through his powerful party officer team. Some senior DUP members thought it best to wait for a Labour government.

I knew that a DUP return might happen quickly but said it would not happen without a rupture – I had spoken to influential figures in the party who were bitterly opposed to the Irish Sea border. But I was wrong: a clear majority of those 12 party officers endorsed a restoration of Stormont, as did an even bigger majority of the larger party executive. Significant internal opposition has been almost zero. DUP critics have levelled their fire at the outgoing Conservative government, not at their own party’s capitulation amid risible claims that the major internal trade barrier is gone.

Staying out was vindicated in that it clearly achieved mitigations in the border, but there was always a strong case for return too – chiefly that if Stormont stayed down unionists would be punished in ways that no UK government would ever penalise the party once inextricably linked to the IRA, Sinn Fein.

Now one of the only DUP MLAs who was cool about the Stormont deal, Jonathan Buckley, might soon be MP for Lagan Valley, meaning a near total lack of assembly opposition to the Irish Sea border (although Mr Buckley was not exactly outspoken against the agreement).

We will soon find out if a Labour government is any friend of unionists. I think it unlikely, but it is not an absurd hope: Labour governments have been a disappointment to Irish nationalists, who have enjoyed their big gains under Conservatives.

Twenty years ago I reported for the Belfast Telegraph on newly released cabinet papers which revealed that in 1968 the then Labour prime minister Harold Wilson had resisted Terence O'Neill's efforts to find a Catholic judge for a judicial vacancy. Mr Wilson said the job should go to the most qualified candidate, who was a Protestant.

Think about that – the leader of a supposedly apartheid pre-Troubles Stormont was so sure that a Protestant appointment, no matter how justified, would be seen by nationalists as a sign of unionist bigotry that he urged Downing Street to discriminate positively in favour of a Catholic judge over a better qualified Protestant, Maurice Gibson. But a Labour PM rejected this plea and actually intervened to make sure that the best candidate, Mr Gibson, got the job (he did, and was later murdered by the IRA).

It was the post 1970 Conservative government of Ted Heath that (in effect) scrapped Stormont, and it was a post 1974 Labour one that gave up on Sunningdale, and then installed two firmly anti IRA secretaries of state, Merlyn Rees and Roy Mason.

It was the Tories who signed the disastrous Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, and then approved the problematic 1993 Downing Street Declaration and 1995 Framework Document.

Tony Blair, even before he came to power, jettisoned the pro Irish nationalist approach of the Labour’s long-serving shadow Northern Ireland spokesman Kevin McNamara and as prime minister was mostly firm on the Union (albeit inclined towards appeasing republicans). His ally Peter Mandelson was no friend of nationalists.

It was this post 2010 Conservative government that ultimately presided over the biggest constitutional setback for Northern Ireland since 1921 in the form of the Irish Sea border. It is fair, however, to note that the outline of that frontier was conceded amid political paralysis over the Brexit caused by the 2017 election hung parliament.

The Tories have a history of letting down unionists but at the same time Labour is not a movement that is instinctively sympathetic to unionism. It has long had a strain – personified by Jeremy Corbyn, who would not criticise the IRA, and John McDonnell MP, who once gushed about them – that is hostile to unionists. The father of Labour’s NI spokesman, Hilary Benn, Tony Benn, was in that camp (his son is a safer pair of hands who was an early critic of the outworkings of the Northern Ireland Protocol, and has dismissed demands for a border poll).

The Conservative administrations since 2019 have cooled relations with Ireland in response to Dublin’s increasingly partisan Irish nationalism. There was a feeling in London that unionists took the hit over Brexit and deserved help in other ways. The pushback against Ireland did not go far enough, particularly in light of its hypocritical legal action over the Legacy Act, but has been welcome even so. Labour is unlikely to sustain the coolness, and resist an immigration border in the Irish Sea or stand up to republicans on legacy. Unionists foolishly emboldened both Labour and the Irish government by failing to challenge the line that ‘all parties oppose the Legacy Act’, thus letting it seem as if unionists and SF are agreed on legacy. Whatever follows that act will probably perpetuate the imbalance against the security forces in historic investigations.

I think Rishi Sunak has made a mistake in dashing to the polls. It doesn’t alter the fact that Labour is likely to thrash him come election day. People cite 1992 when John Major unexpectedly returned the Tories, but Labour was only slightly ahead in the polling prior to that election. When Labour did finally win a 1997 landslide it came after a consistent 15% to 20% poll lead over the Conservatives, like now. So the prime minister could have privately realised that defeat was almost certain and held out until the last possible date, late January, and embedded key policies such as on Rwanda, making them UK-wide.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor