Madam, - The British Labour Party's decision to allow people in Northern Ireland to join it removes a long-standing grievance. It was always absurd to deny people in the Six Counties who wished to join that party as individuals the same right to do so as enjoyed by everyone else in the world (with the exception of Britain, where members must belong to a constituency branch). Whether it would be sensible for UK Labour actually to organise in the North is quite another matter. The Conservatives tried it a few years ago and fizzled out after an initial blaze of publicity.
The reality is that the politics of left and right can only hope fully to replace the politics of Orange and Green in the North once the constitutional question is seen to be settled. That is what the Good Friday Agreement is aimed at achieving and when it succeeds - as eventually it will - there will be all sorts of realignments in the politics of this island. Some people within the SDLP are already contemplating the future in this regard.
Until that happy day dawns, however, the SDLP should relax about UK Labour, even if it did choose to run candidates for election in the North. It poses no real threat to the party. Most of its activists and voters will be "small-U unionists" - such as Kate Hoey and Boyd Black - and in elections by single transferable vote, any first-preference vote that might switch from the SDLP to a British Labour candidate would almost certainly return at full value later in the count when that candidate is eliminated as s/he surely would be.
I appreciate the concerns of good friends like Kevin McNamara but I believe they are misplaced. - Yours, etc.,
Jonathan Stephenson,
(SDLP Chairperson, 1995-1998),
Windsor Park,
Belfast 9.