Owen Polley: The DUP monopoly on unionism at Westminster has been broken

That redrawn electoral landscape brings challenges for unionists, but it creates opportunities too. In fact, let’s be upbeat first and look at the positives from this election.

Firstly, the SNP was humiliated in a way that, until recently, would have seemed impossible.

Remember all those predictions that the UK would soon disintegrate and the process would start in Scotland? Nicola Sturgeon’s plan was that the next Westminster election would become a plebiscite on independence. Yet, on Friday her party, now led by John Swinney, retained just nine of the 48 seats it won in 2019.

The result showed that, while separatism is powered by a sense of inevitability, the path of history is rarely so straightforward. In Northern Ireland, unionists can take encouragement from the SNP’s collapse.

Another positive is that nationalist candidates here did not make progress in catching up with the overall pro-Union vote.

On X, the former DUP strategist and ‘numbers addict’, Lee Reynolds, calculated the figures as 43.2% pro-UK and 40.4% for Irish separatism.

The result in 2019 was similar and nationalism’s share has not gone up by a meaningful amount in the last 25 years. That’s before we think about stay-at-home unionists, or the make-up of Alliance’s voters. The unionist parties in Northern Ireland may have difficulties, but they’re not caused by a surge in support for breaking up the UK.

If you’re looking for another reason to be cheerful, Labour’s landslide offers something of a new start. Unionists felt let down by the Conservatives over the past 14 years. Successive Tory prime ministers expressed their backing for our place in the UK, but frequently undermined those sentiments with their actions.

In theory at least, Sir Keir Starmer says that he supports maintaining the Union between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. And he told the BBC last year that a referendum on our status was “not even on the horizon”.

Some unionists also hope that Labour’s policies will ease problems with the Irish Sea border. For example, Starmer wants to broker a veterinary agreement with the EU, which could mean fewer checks on food and animal products.

There are plenty of reasons to be wary about the new government too, but a freshened slate of pro-Union MPs can try to make a more persuasive case for Northern Ireland to a new government.

Of course, the election result was not all good news. Sinn Fein continued to win more votes, though its number of seats remained unchanged. The party’s stranglehold on nationalism continues, with all the connotations of twisted morality and hatred that carries.

The current prominent position of apologists for terror in our political system damages relationships between communities in Northern Ireland and prevents an acceptable resolution to questions about the past.

In Fermanagh South Tyrone, the unionist candidate, Diana Armstrong, gave the impression early in the count that she could beat Sinn Fein’s Pat Cullen. Unfortunately, her optimism was misplaced and the former nursing union chief won fairly comfortably. The constituency will now be represented by a politician who could not even condemn the slaughter of its residents in the Enniskillen bombing.

In addition, some unionist MPs now only have slender leads in areas where they previously enjoyed resounding majorities. In several instances, though, that was explained by other pro-Union candidates performing better than expected, rather than nationalists or Alliance eating into the unionist vote.

To take one example, Sammy Wilson’s formerly safe seat in East Antrim effectively became a three-way marginal. Alliance made no progress in second place, but the UUP’s John Stewart was less than 1,000 votes behind Danny Donnelly and just 2,000 behind Wilson.

The headline was that Wilson barely survived, but, to take a broader view, the overall unionist vote in the constituency rose substantially. There were plenty of similar nuances for party strategists to ponder, as they looked at the results over the weekend.

For the DUP, the election came in the wake of Sir Jeffrey Donaldson’s deal with the government and his subsequent arrest. At the start of the campaign, the party was forced to U-turn on the Irish border, because it had so oversold ‘Safeguarding the Union’.

It’s not surprising that these difficult circumstances broke the DUP’s monopoly of unionism at Westminster. The party should take its defeat with humility, rather than lashing out at rivals.

In the future, there are likely to be more unspoken anti-unionist pacts, as Sinn Fein and other nationalists choose not to contest seats if they judge that Alliance could unseat a pro-Union MP. The parties are going to have to think about that challenge carefully and respond with pragmatism if they do not want unionists to be picked off one by one.

That does not involve everyone else standing aside in favour of the DUP. The party is no longer dominant enough to expect ‘unionist unity’ to mean simply giving it a free run.

Meanwhile, Northern Ireland’s pro-Union MPs, bolstered by Robin Swann’s blunt style and the forensic mind of Jim Allister, return to Westminster with a familiar task. They will try to strengthen our place in the UK, play a constructive role in national politics and make a sympathetic case for this province to their counterparts on the mainland.

We must hope that they are successful.