With just a week until the General Election, we sometimes hear questions about why the British Labour Party doesn’t field candidates in Northern Ireland. Indeed, and not unexpectedly, this part of the world barely gets a mention in UK electoral debates.

Sometimes though there is a call for Labour to stand here, the same as they stand in Scotland and Wales. But presently, the SDLP carry the baton for the mainstream labour movement on this side of the water when electoral races are run.

Of course, in Fermanagh and South Tyrone, in the 2024 general election, there’s no shortage of candidates on the left. Paul Blake is representing the SDLP and Gerry Cullen is standing for the Cross-Community Labour Alternative.

Very significantly, and certainly attracting the most media attention, another Cullen is standing as Sinn Féin candidate. Having served as the General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, where she led one of the largest nurses’ strikes in history, Pat Cullen’s left-wing credentials are truly on the frontline.

It could even be argued that Pat Cullen is far to the left of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party as it is now. A party that’s more welcoming to disgraced Tories than it is to people who’ve been stalwarts of the British Left for decades.

It was pitiful to watch Keir Starmer squirm in his seat when recently asked by Sky TV’s Beth Rigby why he said that “Jeremy Corbyn would make a great Prime Minister". 

Personally, though Jeremy is a great MP and a brilliant advocate for so many worthy causes, I’m not sure he would have been a ‘great’ Prime Minister but he couldn’t have been any worse than May, Johnson, Truss or Sunak.

But Keir Starmer couldn’t bring himself to say that. For whatever reason, he’s more focused on denigrating the Left than attacking the opposition. And that’s probably based on political strategy rather than personal ideology.

The Labour Party of the present time is shaped as much by what steering groups tell it about public opinion as it is by socialist principles. There’s a belief that everything left of centre has to be abandoned in order to be electable in England.

And those are the key words – in England. As if England’s just this massive homogenous place where everywhere’s the same. But London’s as different from Newcastle and Newcastle as different from Boston or Bolton as Dublin is from Belfast or Belfast is from Brookeborough or Brookeborough is from Boston.

The England that Keir Starmer is trying to win is the Brexit 2016-2019 England. Probably there’s still enough of that remaining to roll into power in 2024, but by 2029’s General Election, if that’s when it is, that period will be longer ago.

By then, a Labour Party that has swung to the right and swept to power purely on the basis of Tory misrule, won’t seem so attractive to voters. That’s why I think Labour’s abandonment of what it calls the ‘hard left’ is unsustainable.

The idea of a ‘hard left’ is a ridiculous one anyway. Using that label for someone like Diane Abbott is like calling croquet a violent sport. It’s the language of people who’ve never seen or taken part in a game of ice hockey, or even camogie.

England’s ‘hard left’ is a phrase coined by people who’ve had a soft life. A while back, I read an article in the New Yorker magazine by a writer of Indian origin who talked about colonised countries knowing the feel of a gun barrel’s cold steel.

Most of England’s middle classes, outside those in the armed forces, don’t. They’ve also never known much financial hardship. Unfortunately, here, all sides of the community know both hardship and war too personally.

And significantly, in a recent interview with this paper, Pat Cullen showed a genuine recognition of how, green or orange, we all bleed the same way.

Our politics, pardon my French, is just too damned real for many other British politicians, for whom politics is often a career choice. On this side of the water, people know about the danger of soundbites and how language carries consequences.

That was summed up in the life of probably the most significant left-wing thinker on the working-class Loyalist side of local politics. David Ervine’s life inspired a one-man theatre play entitled ‘The Man Who Swallowed A Dictionary'.

And it’s one I am going to check out because though I didn’t agree with some of his pronouncements, David Ervine ultimately was closer to the likes of Pat Cullen or Mick Lynch, in many respects, than to those in mainstream Unionism of his time.

In some senses too, David Ervine’s politics were probably closer to many of the original values of the Labour Party, minus the violence of his youth. Originally it was a Christian socialist party and a party that was patriotic about being British.

And in being the British Labour Party, there’s another very strong reason why it’s hard for Labour to stand in Northern Ireland. Under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, the party must be neutral when it comes to deciding on future political arrangements, particularly around the constitutional question.

Of course, it is possible for Labour to stand as a party, somewhat like Alliance, representing a view of constitutional affiliation as a personal choice. The South Belfast MLA Anna Lo has voiced support for a United Ireland whilst other party colleagues might have a pro-Union or pro-status quo position.

In theory, then, Northern Irish Labour candidates could also stand for election whilst holding various views on unity or union. But in practice, under a present-day, pro-union leadership, that might prove very difficult.

Anyhow, the Labour Party as it has been in recent times probably wouldn’t be all that electable amongst Northern Ireland’s leftist electorate. We have to remember that when it came to the leadership elections prior to Starmer’s tenure, the vast majority of Labour Party members in Northern Ireland supported Jeremy Corbyn.

However, it should also be noted that back in 2016, Corbyn himself went on record as supporting a debate on the issue of Labour standing in Northern Ireland to address what he called “a democratic deficit” for Northern Irish Labour Party members.

But in the post-Corbyn era, there’s a democratic deficit of a whole other kind. Today’s Labour is trying to leave the Left behind and in a place like this that’s been left behind too long, that’s not going to be much of a vote winner locally.