Claire Hanna featured in a full-page interview in this paper with John Manley on Monday. It was to mark 100 days as SDLP leader. Fair play to John for noticing; no-one else did.
The interview was a skilful operation as you’d expect. Manley let her rabbit on. The more she talked, the less she said.
Not a single proposal, concrete or otherwise, no specifics, no programme of action. Airy fairy.
Try this. “I just think we’re going to locate some of what we’re doing a little bit more in social democracy. I know sometimes that can be pretty opaque terms for people but it’s about coherence, ambition and bringing people together – that’s making those values real for people.” What a load of codswallop. As clear as mud.
What is clear, however, is that she’s on the wrong page as far as politics in the north are concerned.
Instead, she’s very much taken up with British politics, mainly the internal workings of the Labour party and the mess Starmer is making of translating his huge majority into radical change.
Also his response, or should that be lack of response, to the genocide Israel has been committing in Gaza. As she said correctly, “all that is doing quite serious damage to the perception of the Labour Party”.
So what? Fair enough as a commentary, but it has nothing to do with her. She’s not even a participant observer.
She’s not a member of that party, and although she might cleave instinctively to British politics, she’s not involved in them.
There’s absolutely nothing she can do about politics in the other island, something she doesn’t seem to realise.
What about politics on this island where she could make a difference? That’s where Hanna demonstrates she’s not at the races, unlike her predecessor Colum Eastwood.
He copped on a few years ago that we’re in the end game in the north and in effect opted out of Westminster impotence to concentrate on reunification, now the only game in town.
Unaware of the sheer pointlessness of concentrating on what is really English politics, Hanna had nothing to say about developments on this island except to pay lip service to them.
Astonishingly, she made no proposals about the multi-milliion Shared Island project and how it could be developed in the future.
Nothing to say for example about a new university in Derry or strengthening links between Magee and Letterkenny Institute of Technology.
Nothing about connecting Altnagelvin and Letterkenny University Hospital or an all-Ireland health service to mitigate the north’s disastrous, or in Michelle O’Neill’s words, “dire and diabolical”, state of the health service. As for developing the all-Ireland economy, nada, zilch.
Hanna doesn’t seem to realise the future lies on this island and as a party leader she should have specific proposals for that future.
That’s where the needle on the dial is pointing and that’s what people here want discussed.
On the contrary, she seemed to contradict Eastwood’s New Ireland Commission project when she pooh-poohed reunification plans, saying entirely inaccurately: “I think there’s been an obsession in northern nationalism about mechanism – the when of constitutional change – rather than the why and how.”
She is obviously unaware of the huge amount of work, academic and otherwise, devoted precisely to the why and how.
Why would she be aware when it’s obvious from her interview that her views are indistinguishable from those of the Alliance party whose political clothes she has stolen in South Belfast and Mid-Down?
To transfer Dean Acheson’s quip on Britain’s decline onto a microscopic scale, the SDLP has lost an electorate and failed to find a role in politics here to provide the party with a substitute.
Hanna’s political view of the north is so last century. Her concept of the party remains the one that people’s parents and grandparents voted for a generation ago when the challenges were different.
All that changed 20 years ago when Sinn Féin and the DUP took over the north.
The north is now on borrowed time, even unionists realise that.
Hanna’s interview demonstrates her SDLP is stuck in a time warp.