Ben Lowry: The Labour government is not going to be a good friend of unionists, but it is still too early to say if it will be positively bad for them

​Delegates will be in jubilant form after their stunning electoral victory at the beginning of the summer, returning to power after 14 long years in opposition.

They have things to worry about, for sure, including the fact that they only got a paltry third of the UK vote but a massive two thirds of the number of seats at Westminster. That is the sort of combination that could lead to a major reversal of fortunes at the next general election.

But Sir Keir Starmer has done something that the coalition Tory-Liberal Democrat government did not properly do in 2010 when it was pursuing its austerity agenda (I prefer to call it a path of fiscal responsibility) – get the unpopular decisions out of the way early on. An example being the decision to means test winter fuel payments.

Can we yet say if the Labour government for unionists?

The question is of interest because some influential members of the DUP, who would not support the deal to return to Stormont, began to wait for the increasingly likely prospect of a new Labour government to replace the Tory one.

This was when the DUP was divided amid Sir Jeffrey Donaldson’s utterly inaccurate claim that his party had got rid of the Irish Sea border, when in fact the scale of that trade frontier within the UK is set to get ever more apparent in the coming weeks. Incidentally, I wrote and said in broadcasts that I could not see a DUP return to the assembly in such circumstances without a rupture. I said that after speaking to hardcore critics of the deal.

No such rupture was forthcoming. Not even close. The DUP is back at Stormont with almost no internal dissent, or if there is such behind-the-scenes unhappiness it is has minimal impact within the party.

But were the sceptics right to wait for Labour?

I was always wary of such an approach, and wrote an article back in May explaining why (Click here to read it: ‘Some unionists think that Labour will be better for Northern Ireland's place in the UK, but I doubt it’).

At the same time, I thought that if unionists merely accepted such constitutional change it would send out a signal that unionists would accept pretty much anything without significant complaint (I think there was a possible third path: of expressing contempt for what has been done to unionists, but saying that in recognition of the appalling options, the double standards shown to Sinn Fein and in the interests of Northern Ireland, the party was going back to Stormont).

The Labour movement, while hardly known for its unionism, has always had a unionist strain. You could say, in fact, that a form of unionism has had the upper hand in the party ever since the hardcore Irish nationalist Kevin McNamara MP was ditched by Tony Blair as Labour’s Northern Ireland Shadow Secretary in 1994. In the 15 years prior to that Labour overtly favoured Irish nationalism over unionism.

The strain that has the upper hand at present is one that instinctively thinks of Northern Ireland as part of the UK. Such a mindset could be very important to us unionists in the coming decades.

The idea that Labour would actually be better than the Tory one was superficially attractive, given that NI has had a disastrous succession of Conservative secretaries of state who were clueless about here, of whom Karen Bradley was only the most obviously out of her depth, and so were beholden to an NIO bureaucracy that I still think could with justification be called the Neutral Ireland Office (as opposed to its actual name the Northern Ireland Office).

But while that was a grim state of affairs under the Tories, there were influential figures within government including the historian John Bew and Lord (Jonathan) Caine who knew NI well, and also knew when Ireland was over-reaching itself.

I don’t see any sign at all of such figures within the Labour Party. Already the government has shown spectacular naivete and weakness towards an Irish government that has had the audacity to sue it over legacy when Ireland would not extradite open terrorists over 30 years – a policy that led to hundreds of murders along the border, and for which Ireland has entirely escaped scrutiny.

The new government is not even citing the Tory-DUP Safeguarding the Union deal, and seems to be abandoning key aspects of it such as the pledge to remove legal obligations to promote the so-called ‘all island economy’.

It is too early to say whether this Labour government will be positively bad for unionism. It certainly seemed that way after this week’s decision to spend scores of millions more on a vile Troubles murder, that of Pat Finucane, which has already had so much scrutiny. I won’t write more about that now –here is a link to a recent piece that made clear my views on lopsided legacy and the role of the courts here in it (‘Unionists have inadvertently helped to reinstate a pro IRA approach to the legacy of the Troubles,’ August 3)

But the decision on Casement, while perhaps entirely financial, suggests nationalists are not going to get everything they demand.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor