Talking about your ULA…

In the profile of the Independents in the Irish Times by Harry McGee recently there were a few words devoted to the ULA.

The ULA is a strange concoction – an alliance working within an alliance. There were expectations that People Before Profit and the Socialist Party would merge soon after the election. But progress has been slow and the ULA has not had the impact or cohesion that similar small left-wing political parties like the Workers’ Party had in the past. Part of the reason was that the ULA lacked the structure of a party, or indeed the detailed policy platform.

From a sympathetic position it is difficult to argue with this analysis. It has now been almost a year since the election, but of course the ULA existed prior to that election, so in truth it has had been a discrete element in the political mix for quite some time. Yet both at national level in representative institutions and in campaigns it is more marked by its absence as a unitary body.

The most recent news of the postponement of the ULA conference in February, when only recently announced that it was taking place, merely reinforces this sense of absence. It’s not that anyone expected it not to be difficult to form a new formation from previously existing, and often hostile and competitive parties, but to paraphrase a line from West Wing, ‘it should be just a little bit easier’.

This is a serious issue which some would say needs to be addressed. Because either individually, as the components – SP and PBP/SWP and Seamus Healy, or collectively there hasn’t been the sense that it is operating as a unit. It’s not simply cohesion, the ULA could remain as a de facto electoral alliance indefinitely – I suspect – and still be effective [though whether the balance between those who won’t leave it for fear of being seen as destructive as against those for whom the status quo is just perfect and negates the need to be any more constructive can be maintained for any great length of time is an interesting question], but a sense that there’s less common direction than might have been expected. None of which is to criticise the hard and continuous work of those in it or to suggest there’s something intrinsically wrong with it either as a concept or an actuality. McGee continues:

There were also rumours – wholly dismissed by them – that its two strongest personalities, Higgins and Richard Boyd Barrett, did not get on. More recently, its five TDs have been assigned portfolios and it has begun to produce joint policy papers, notably in the run-up to the budget. But it has not set the world alight. There were expectations of a more informal left-wing sub-group coming together for strategic purposes, that would include the ULA, Thomas Pringle and John Halligan. But that has yet to happen.

In a way though all this was inevitable. Anyone with any knowledge of the Irish further left will be aware of the difficult histories that sit behind the ULA. The fact it exists, even in its current form, is an achievement in itself. Five left wing TDs, moreover five whose backgrounds can broadly be regarded as being in the Trotskyist tradition, being elected in this state is a remarkable turn around.

But it’s far from sufficient, and they could prove as ephemeral as other formations have done in the past. One needs only to look at the individual constituencies to see how post election 201? [for we known not the year nor the month] those numbers could be cut and cut again.

So yes, those histories influence the present. But let’s try to park them for the moment and consider a few basic approaches that could be taken even without a further degree of actual cohesion.

There’s no cause for retrospective wailing and gnashing of teeth, but a more cohesive image is of importance, as the recent by-election demonstrates. It’s not that Ruth Coppinger would have been a shoe-in if the ULA had more presence nationally or even locally. Given the constituency she was standing in she probably had as good a chance as anyone from the SP, or the ULA, with Higgins and the SPs high profile. But an ULA with greater presence might have been sufficient to garner extra and unexpected votes from people who saw that she represented both the attractive strand of Joe Higgins style politics, but also a growing national force [it’s not of course that Higgins doesn’t represent the latter, but his vote, like Gregory’s and other left Independents – in their specific constituencies – is often as much about the man as much as his politics]. And strategically that’s a seat that the SP and the ULA must examine carefully for the future.

To some extent the ULA is a victim of its position in national politics. It is squirreled away within the Technical Group. It doesn’t take much to see that five within sixteen, particularly when among the sixteen there tend to be… somewhat flamboyant characters…is problematic, not least when the five seem to plough their own furrow much of the time. Indeed it is here that the Oireachtas approach seems particularly problematic.

Why don’t the five ULA TDs sit together more often? Why is more not made of them as a bloc? These aren’t necessarily determining issues but again visuals matter, particularly in a Dáil where SF has carved out a real presence for itself.

There’s the issue of simplification… as was put to me it’s tough enough to explain about the the Technical Group without going into the detail of the ULA – ‘Well it’s made up of the SP, the WUAG, People Before Profit, though Richard Boyd Barret is from the SWP and Joan Collins is independent of the two larger groups and no, not everyone on the further left is in them’. The ULA should be the short hand and the backgrounds irrelevant, at least in the Oireachtas itself. And perhaps outside it.

Simply put everything any of the constituent elements of the ULA put out, every platform they sit on,every campaign they are a part of, every speech they make, should be badged with the ULA in some form or fashion. Are there competing campaigns? Well, so be it. But each should have an ULA identifier on them somewhere. Different protests? The ULA should have a defined presence. And so on. This sounds like duplication? Perhaps that’s the price of not having a unitary party.

I was long fond of the Scottish Socialist Party approach of platforms within a larger unit – though the later history of that formation is not one any of us with inclinations towards the further left will draw much comfort from, and no one, I imagine, expects the constituent elements to discard their specific identities, even were that possible.

But even if all this were purely tactical, and the ULA remains an alliance rather than an unitary body, it is absolutely necessary that for the moment it takes poll position as the expression of that group of five further left TDs, those further left councillors and as, or perhaps more, importantly, further left activity in campaigns, on streets and so on. The balance unfortunately appears to have been tipping away from that towards individual components and ‘their’ campaigns. Time to redress that balance.