Ben Lowry: Three things to watch out for in the coming Stormont election

There are three key things to watch out for.

l The first is the extent to which the campaign and results are influenced by the most obvious and important issue in the contest — the Northern Ireland Protocol

There is no shortage of pundits who will say that the voters care more about issues such as health. But when it comes to casting their ballots, up to 90% of people who go have hitherto gone to the polls in NI elections have voted for political parties who are primarily identified by their stance on the constitutional question.

Even in recent elections the non-aligned centre ground, despite having surged (the parties and candidates that are neutral on whether Northern Ireland stays in the UK, or joins the Republic), are doing well to get more than 15% of the votes.

Do not be fooled by anyone who says that the protocol is only of importance to unionists, and that even many unionists do not care.

Many of the people who make this point themselves care very much about the Irish Sea border — they want to keep it, either because they support staying in the EU (or as close to it as possible), or because they see it as major step towards an economic united Ireland, and thus towards a more general all-Ireland.

It is true that many of the more apolitical unionists are much more relaxed about the protocol than they should be, but that is typically because it is complex (so complex indeed that the still unfolding scale of the Irish Sea border shows how few people grasped the full implications of what Boris Johnson and Leo Varadkar agreed in 2019).

It is also because such unionists heard that the protocol offered the best of both worlds (which it doesn’t — it gives primacy to the European Union single market over the internal market of the nation to which we belong, United Kingdom).

Thus unionists should have been, and should still be, trying to explain and reiterate to some of the more apathetic pro Union voters the ultimate impact of the NI Protocol. This would entail trying to revive some of the spirit of indignation that there was in the early months of 2021, when many people across the Province were suddenly finding that they could not get deliveries from Great Britain that they had always been able to get before.

The EU has been keen to agree to case-by-case exemptions to checks in part because it does not want the wider public to be troubled by the protocol. Needless to say, therefore, unionists badly need to see a large vote for parties that oppose the protocol.

Doug Beattie’s approach to the Irish Sea border, of opposing it but calling for engagement in the pursuit of political solutions to the problems that it creates, has a high-wire quality.

If the Alliance vote goes down, even slightly, on recent elections, and the Ulster Unionist Party vote increases, Mr Beattie will be able to say that his tactics have stemmed the decline of unionism by broadening its appeal.

If Alliance continues upwards, and the UUP does not rise, he will be seen to have not only been weak on the protocol, but having failed to win over moderates in the process.

l The second key thing to watch out for in the election is turnout

There was a time in the 1990s and early 2000s when it seemed voters in the western world were losing interest in politics.

Countries such as the UK and United States were increasingly wealthy and many bitter political disagreements of the 1960s and 70s seemed to give way to a more bland, moderate politics. In Northern Ireland itself, this wider trend towards consensus seemed to be reflected in the 1998 Belfast Agreement.

But this sense of stable politics has evaporated, at home and abroad. There are now bitter divides on major issues of national and global importance, and much turbulence in voting patterns.

The Brexit referendum of 2016 had a higher turnout (more than 70% of voters) than most recent UK general elections have done.

The Scottish independence plebiscite in 2014 had an even higher turnout (more than 80%).

The fiercely contested, and narrowly decided, US presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in November 2020 had one of the highest turnouts of any presidential race in modern memory (more than 60% of voters which is high by American standards).

In Northern Ireland, the turnout surged from 55% of voters in the 2016 Stormont election to 65% a year later, in the more fraught atmosphere of the election after Sinn Fein collapsed the institutions.

There is now keen interest in conflicts and politics at home and abroad. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, I feared people in the UK would not care much, seeing it as a distant problem. I was relieved to be proven wrong by the massive interest there was in such a serious global matter.

A high turnout next month would show that the population in NI still think that Stormont and issues such as the protocol matter.

l The final thing to watch is the vote shares of the two communities

Will it be like the 2017 general election, when the DUP and Sinn Fein dominated things (winning between them 65% of all votes) or like 2019 when they plunged to a combined 53%?

Will unionists get a combined vote share in the high 40s %, as in the 2016 and 17 Stormont elections, or will they be down round 42%, as in 2019 Westminster?

Will nationalists combined get more than 40% of the vote, as they have done in some elections, or go back under that level?

It will be a bad day indeed for unionism if the combined vote is as low as 41%, as some polls have suggested, or even in the high 30s.