Boris Johnson left a “wholly negative legacy” for the island of Ireland but difficulties in Northern Ireland also stem from a “stinking status quo” that has stifled ambition and drive for change, the new leader of the Social Democratic and Labour party has said.
Weeks after taking over from Colum Eastwood, Claire Hanna, spoke about her plans to revive the SDLP, pull Northern Ireland out of past mindsets and fight for new partnerships with Dublin on health and other public services.
The MP for Belfast South and Mid Down admitted the party had spent too much time fighting to limit the damage of Johnson’s Brexit, backed by the Democratic Unionists but not Sinn Féin, which does not take its seats in Westminster.
But she lamented “the lack of ambition and the lack of imagination” in Stormont since the peace settlement won by the former SDLP leader John Hume and vowed to fight for transformative change in the region.
“If you look at the agenda paper in the assembly, week in week out, it is full of non-binding motions, private members’ business, general debate.
“It’s ‘This house likes bunny rabbits’, ‘This house marks kitten day.’ It is not seeking meaningful reform of itself. And that is the stinking status quo of the establishment and that includes Sinn Féin, DUP and the Alliance.”
Speaking of the “inequality and sectarianism and lack of vision like a straitjacket on our society”, she said it was time for Northern Ireland to stop being stuck between the past and the future.
Stormont, she said, was simply “not delivering the change Northern Ireland needs”.
Her own party faces a battle to regenerate after being squeezed into fifth position in Stormont elections in 2022, and she admitted its anti-Brexit passion during the years the assembly was not sitting had curbed the leadership’s capacity to address local issues.
“Brexit did two things. It sucked the oxygen out of politics. Normal politics just didn’t exist, the politics about waiting lists, infrastructure just didn’t happen. Politics just walked off the job. And [secondly] it was all so polarising,” she said.
Speaking of Johnson and his Brexit negotiator David Frost, she added: “They have left a wholly negative legacy for this island. They denigrated Britain, they damaged Britain’s reputation and made Britain a laughing stock in its decisions, its arrogance and delusions about the possibilities of Brexit.
“We have wasted the last eight years talking about a problem that did not need to exist,” she said.
She said she thought Brexit “hugely accelerated” the conversation around a united Ireland but that a border poll was “unlikely” in the next five years. However, she said she believed it had given Northern Ireland an opportunity to take back control of its destiny.
“They [Johnson and Frost] wanted to tear down relationships to a kind of ground zero, and as we try to rebuild those, the only responsible thing to do is rebuild them in a way that gives us more control over our lives and restricts the control that people like David Frost, who remains a parliamentarian [in the House of Lords], has over our lives. That is a key motivator for me,” she said.
Last Wednesday she pushed the Northern Ireland finance minister, Caoimhe Archibald, to bring forward more ambitious proposals for local fiscal devolution to allow for the transformation of the country’s economy.
Official figures on Tuesday showed Northern Ireland has the joint lowest increase in earnings across the 12 UK regions over the year and now ranks third lowest of the regions, with weekly earnings more than £60 below the UK average in 2024.
In the long term, the SDLP sees its fortunes in a united Ireland in some shape or form. Hanna said the party had a responsibility to take on the conversation about constitutional change.
She said a strong role in the conversation could be played by Ireland’s former taoiseach Leo Varadkar, who recently said he believed Brexit and the possibility of being able to rejoin the EU had caused some people to support Irish unification that otherwise would not have existed.
Redesigning Northern Ireland’s future would involve building new relationships with Dublin as well as London, Hanna said. She recently spent time in the Irish parliament and suggested a north-south civil service exchange programme to all the parties in the republic as it prepares for a general election.
She also called for deep changes to the power-sharing system, a post-Good Friday peace agreement that gives Sinn Féin and the DUP disproportionate power to veto and collapse Stormont.
