Northern Ireland Votes: East Belfast

East Belfast is one of the most interesting constituencies in all of Northern Ireland, in my opinion. Its population is both the eldest of the seats, and the least Catholic. Yet befitting its urban status it also has the second highest population of no religious views, and a minor immigrant population. Like many urban areas it is an area of contradictions. Home to loyalist working class areas and liberal middle class areas; it is a seat of contrasts therefore, both highly Unionist and highly cross-community at the same time. It is also the seat of Peter Robinson, DUP leader, and Reg Empey who was UUP leader until May last year. It is also the only seat in the province with a Unionist MLA from outside the main two Unionist parties, Dawn Purvis, formerly of the Progressive Unionist Party, whose support is almost entirely restricted to the loyalist working class areas of this seat. Most interestingly of all however after 29 years of being held by Ian Paisley’s long-time deputy and successor as DUP leader and First Minister, Peter Robinson, in May 2010 this happened:

Candidate	Party	Vote	Change
Naomi Long	Alliance	37.2%	+26.2%
Peter Robinson	DUP	32.8%	-19.6%
Trevor Ringland	UUP/Con	21.2%	-8.3%
David Vance	TUV	5.4%	+5.4%
Niall Donnelly	Sinn Fein	2.4%	-0.1%
Mary Muldoon	SDLP	1.1%	-1.1%

On election night I nearly fell off my chair when this came up. At the prior election Peter Robinson had held 52.4% of the vote, he lost his seat on a massive 22.9% swing to Naomi Long of the Alliance, a party which had never before won control of a Westminster seat, and which had come third at the last election. Without a doubt the most sensational Northern Irish election result of the night, and possibly the most sensational result in all of the UK. Two reasons are put forth for this. The Alliance will often say that Long, a MLA for the seat, has been a strong presence in the seat, and has been working the constituency religiously for years. This is no doubt true, and we need only evidence Long’s 2007 result in this seat where she doubled Alliance support and got the highest Alliance vote in all of Northern Ireland for the proof of that. Yet it is also the case that Peter Robinson was hit by a big series of financial scandals during the 12 months leading up to the election, including the frankly incredible revelations relating to his wife, Iris Robinson- a fellow DUP MLA and MP, known as ‘Irisgate’. If you want to know more I’ve recounted much of it in the DUP section of my guide to the Northern Irish election, and it also enjoys its own Wikipedia page. As amazing as this result is, it is clear that a large part of it owes to the personal popularity of Long on the one hand, and the personal unpopularity of Peter Robinson on the other, and therefore it isn’t perhaps the best guide to results, because this was a very personal election. So, the 2007 result then.

MLA	Party	First Pref	Round Elected
Peter Robinson	DUP	19.0%	1
Naomi Long	Alliance	18.8%	1
Reg Empey	UUP	14.0%	3
Wallace Browne	DUP	10.7%	11
Dawn Purvis	PUP/Ind	10.3%	11
Robin Newton	DUP	7.9%	11
Chris Lyttle	Alliance	N/A	N/A

Best Losers	Party	First Pref	Round Eliminated
Michael Copeland	UUP	5.3%	11
Niall O'Donnghaile	Sinn Fein	3.6%	8
Jim Rodgers	UUP	2.8%	9
Mary Muldoon	SDLP	2.8%	10
Steve Agnew	Green	2.2%	7

Overall Result.

Party	Vote	Seats
DUP	37.6%	3
UUP	22.0%	1
Alliance	18.8%	1
PUP	10.3%	1
Sinn Fein	3.6%	0
SDLP	2.8%	0

The Incumbents

Peter Robinson (DUP) is the long-time deputy of DUP legend Ian Paisley. In 2008 Robinson was finally elected leader of the DUP and First Minister accordingly. His time as leader of the DUP, has been rocky, it is fair to say, with a series of financial scandals, particularly relating to expenses and the already mentioned explosive details of ‘Irisgate’. For a long time the DUP First Minister was very embattled, he stood down as First Minister for a six week period in order to fight the revelations relating to his wife, and there were talks of leadership plots amongst his MLAs for a long-time. Losing this Westminster seat in 2010 was a particular blow, but, to his credit, the DUP leader has managed to calm the storm, and rally the troops. It is only a year since ‘Irisgate’ first broke but as Northern Ireland’s premier politics blog Slugger O’Toole put it recently “The scars may still show but the wounds seem to have healed and now he appears to have more tact, charm and even grace. The wounds have also not stopped the formidable political tactician from wheeling out new ideas. His speech on integrated education and follow up leaders speech at the party conference seemed to reveal a man in total command of his party, pushing forward yet again.” After one hell of a leadership wobble, therefore, I feel that Robinson has recovered enough to survive and I find it difficult to see him losing this seat, though it will be interesting to see to what degree DUP supporters vote for other DUP candidates as a protest against him. Also in his favour is helping to save Glentoran football club, sure to be a local vote winner!

Naomi Long (Alliance) resigned her seat after her sensational 2010 victory, to be replaced by Chris Lyttle, Long’s former research assistant. As such he is no doubt familiar with the seat, its issues and its voters. As a graduate of Harvard, he is also clearly an intelligent individual. A key question for the Alliance is how much of Long’s vote they can hold onto, seeing as a proportion of it is clearly linked to personal popularity. Theoretically her 2007 vote equals enough voters to elect 2.6 MLAs, but it’s not that simple. Nonetheless it is difficult to imagine that the Alliance won’t get at least one seat (discussion of their chances of getting a second later) and so Lyttle can probably count himself as safe.

Reg Empey (UUP) was the Ulster Unionist leader from 2005, when David Trimble stood down, in the wake of disastrous election results of going from 5 seats to just 1, until 2010 when Empey presided over the loss of that single seat. He has also been Employment and Learning minister, Enterprise, Trade and Investment minister, and even briefly acting First Minister on the Northern Ireland Executive. As such he is a familiar face in Northern Irish politics. Despite having been made a life peer in the House of Lords for the Conservatives in November 2010, Empey has decided to stand again this year, and is sure to be re-elected in my view.

Wallace Browne (DUP) has been a Belfast councillor since 1985, served as Lord Mayor between 2005 and 2006, and has been a member of the House of Lords since 2005 (a move designed to give the DUP representation in the Lords). Browne wasn’t elected to the Assembly until 2007, and then only on the last count. The last two DUP MLAs only both only just scraped through (in fact neither actually reached the quota, Browne was 500 votes short), and so there is a danger to the DUP here. Therefore there is a possibility for a fight out between the last two DUP MLAs, Browne and his running mate Robin Newton (more on him later).

Dawn Purvis (elected as PUP, now Independent Unionist) was, until 2010, the leader of the Progressive Unionist Party. PUP has long been linked to the loyalist paramilitary force, the Ulster Volunteer Force, and in Summer 2010 the UVF was accused of the murder of one Bobby Moffett. Purvis subsequently left her party, as did many of its activists, and she sits as an Independent Unionist. It is not yet clear whether Purvis will stand again in May. Since leaving the PUP Purvis has attempted to encourage a liberal cross-community appeal helped by the PUP’s prior, slightly bizarre, attempts to do the same. She may attempt to stand again, on an Independent Unionist ticket, hoping to win some Alliance support – indeed Purvis and the PUP backed and campaigned for Long in 2010. If she stands then it is difficult to get a measure on her support, being that she has no party and has not stood in any elections to which we can compare. To some extent she is a figure of debate. In some quarters lionised in others demeaned. My feeling is she will find it difficult to be re-elected however, as her party was on the downslide in 2007 anyway, and she was arguably only elected in 2007 due to a large PUP sympathy vote in 2007. That is if she stands, and I would bet she doesn’t.

Robin Newton (DUP) is the third DUP MLA and is thus wrapped up in the potential DUP intra-party battle I outlined above. By the final count of the 2007 election transfers were as such that Newton was only 417 votes ahead of his UUP opponent Michael Copeland, and almost 900 votes short of the electoral quota. As such he is extremely at risk, and his best chance of being elected is in defeating Browne to be the second placed DUP candidate (because if a DUP candidate is eliminated then most of their votes will transfer to the second DUP candidate and guarantee their election). In Newton’s favour is the fact that he has been a MLA longer (since 2003, rather than 2007) and is currently a junior minister in Peter Robinson’s First Ministry. He may also be able to attend to local business better as Browne is at the Lords every Wednesday and Thursday. To his disadvantage is that despite being an incumbent, Browne beat him in terms of votes in 2007, and Browne’s higher position on the ballot paper (as ballots are in alphabetical order and this can result in problems related to so-called ‘Donkey Voting’. That said, the UUP threat from 2007 has likely diminished, as the UUP continues its fall from grace, so there is a fair chance of securing the third DUP seat anyway.

The Challengers

So there are really two seats potentially up for grabs: Dawn Purvis’s seat, and the third DUP seat. Perhaps the immediate question then, is can the PUP regain Purvis’s seat? The answer to this, I feel, is a resounding ‘no’. While the PUP is standing its new leader, Brian Irvine, brother of his famous predecessor David Irvine, the party is irrevocably linked to paramilitary violence, and has been moribund for a while now. I will be very surprised if the PUP survives this election, either in terms of holding this seat of maintaining its local government presence (which is now down to 2 councillors). If Purvis runs its voters will transfer to her, if she doesn’t I suspect they will divide up amongst the Alliance and the main two Unionist parties.

The party best positioned to take Purvis’s seat, in my opinion, is the Alliance. The Alliance’s second candidate (after Lyttle) is Judith Cochrane. Cochrane is a local councillor and the East Belfast constituency manager. As such, she is, like Lyttle, extremely familiar with the voters, issues and make-up of the constituency. The Alliance is well-positioned to take a second seat. If it takes even half of Naomi Long’s vote it should be good to go, and with more than 2% of voters voting Green in 2007 there are other cross-community voters here to pick up transfers from. Additionally while this constituency is incredibly Protestant and has become even more so with boundary changes there is a small nationalist vote which can be expected to transfer in the Alliance’s general direction. Finally there is a small, but notable, part of the Dawn Purvis/PUP electorate which will preference the Alliance highly. Nonetheless the Alliance suffers from a problem that its momentum seems to be slowing and it lacks Naomi Long. That said Long will no doubt campaign in the constituency and the party will surely attempt to recreate some of the good feeling surrounding the Long campaign in 2010. If it succeeds then a second seat is assured.

The final party with the potential for a gain here is the UUP. For their second candidate the UUP have selected Tim Lemon, a former investment banker in the City of London and a former UUP constituency chairman. He also stood as the Westminster candidate here in 2001 and was once the party campaigns director. As such he is an experienced UUP activist and campaigner. While in some ways they have a useful stick to beat the local DUP with (Peter Robinson’s scandals) the DUP has rebounded quite well, whereas the UUP carries with it a sense of constant crisis. The DUP has recently managed that most magical of tricks as well, by moving to positions that make it appear both more hard-line and more liberal than the UUP at the same time. The UUP will need to perform fairly well in this seat to gain a second seat I feel, maybe Lemon is up to the job. It should also be noted that slight boundary changes have happened to the constituency and the new voters imported into the constituency leaned DUP rather than UUP by about 3 to 1 in 2005 (then again Robinson still lost his seat). Lemon’s other great hope is to gain more transfers from the PUP/Purvis left-of-centre Unionist vote (questionable) or to gain more votes from any Alliance surplus (more likely but not likely to be very many votes). If the Alliance does not succeed in getting a second seat here, however, then Lemon will be in prime territory to take Purvis’s seat.