“We’re picking ourselves up” – interview with SDLP leader Colum Eastwood

Colum Eastwood became leader of Northern Ireland’s Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) in 2015 while serving as Stormont assembly member for his home seat of Foyle. In 2019, he took Foyle’s Westminster seat from Sinn Fein’s Elisha McCallion on a 17% swing. LabourList caught up with the leader of our sister party at conference this year to talk about the SDLP’s recent election results, the future of the party and his views on UK Labour.

There’s little question of what first drew Eastwood into politics. “Being from Derry,” he tells me, politics was “hard to avoid”. “I grew up during the troubles and was 14 when the Good Friday Agreement was signed. Our houses were all civil rights houses, all John Hume supporters,” he says. “I joined the SDLP quite young, just after the Good Friday Agreement, because I felt there was an opportunity for a new generation to do politics in a different way, where we actually had a chance to build a future without violence.”

The SDLP, founded in 1970, has historically been the party of non-violent nationalism with its long time leader John Hume – who held the Westminster seat Eastwood now holds for 22 years – instrumental in the peace process. “John Hume was a great hero… my father was a union man… All that formed my Labour type politics and my nationalism, and my New Ireland-ism, Hume-ism if that’s a term, so it was obvious that the SDLP was the right party.”

It has, however, been a difficult time for Eastwood’s party. At the most recent Stormont elections in May, the SDLP lost four of its 12 seats. Asked how he feels about the results, Eastwood is succinct: “I don’t feel great, you know.” It was, he says, a “tough election” where the SDLP’s cost-of-living crisis message did not cut through and the party found itself “squeezed” by both an increased Sinn Fein vote and by the centrist Alliance party.

“We’ve had a tough time of it, post conflict, because there’s been a move to make the DUP and Sinn Fein larger, bring them into the middle and settle everything down. I’m not sure that’s worked out very well, but that was the strategy employed by two governments,” he tells me. “But look, the tide goes in and the tide goes out. So it also has to come back in again. We had a very good election the election before that, getting two Westminster seats with huge majorities back and I think we’re proving the case that we need to be in Westminster, [SDLP MP for South Belfast] Clare Hanna and myself I think have done a good job. We’re picking ourselves up.”

He says that the party has struggled to define itself in the years after the Good Friday Agreement. Eastwood says that “people got the sense that our job was completed”, adding: “I don’t think we spent anywhere near enough time setting out the next phase of the mission… That’s what we want to do now. It can be summed up simply: we want to create a social democratic new Ireland, where people will have full equality of opportunity, where young people won’t have to emigrate to find a job or university place, where all parts of the island can benefit from economic growth.”

He describes “three big divisions” in Ireland: “One is the obvious geographical division of partition. One is the division in our hearts and minds between the two great traditions. And then there’s the economic division between those who’ve done very well and others who have been left behind.” He says that these will be the focus of his SDLP and tells me: “Truth is, nobody else is going to do it.”

“Sinn Fein can’t do reconciliation, they’re not very interested in it,” Eastwood argues. “They’re only interested in dealing with one of the great divisions. The Alliance party have no interest in talking about the future, in terms of constitutional position. Also, their record in government and in Westminster has been fairly close to the right wing, economically, on welfare reform, on the trade union bill – they’re not us, they’re not social democrats, they’re not on the left. So I think there’s a space for us.”

Like many people, Eastwood sees a “Sinn Fein or Sinn Fein-led” government in the Republic of Ireland as “very likely”. Speaking on this possibility, he says: “I would just ask some people, who think they’ve got this great leftist party who are going to be very progressive and change the world in Dublin, to look at their record in the north – where communities like mine who have been governed by Sinn Fein and the DUP for 15 years – have been totally and utterly left behind. They’ve done nothing to address the regional imbalance, they have done nothing to lift people out of poverty. They handed the power over welfare back to the tories so they could cut it. They’ve done nothing to create jobs or bring investment. I think they’ll be found out in government.”

Eastwood has some tentatively positive words for the new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Chris Heaton-Harris, describing his politics as “absolutely the opposite of mine” but adding that he is “somebody you can get along with”.

“If he’s somebody who plays it with a straight bat and is willing to listen to all the communities and not just the DUP, we’ll work with him, we’ll work with whoever they send. But we need a Labour Secretary of State,” Eastwood says. “There’s no good Tory government, and the Tory record of neglect in Northern Ireland – actually, they’re better when they’re neglecting it, when they’re involved they’re worse”.

When asked about the campaign by the Labour Party in Northern Ireland to stand candidates at elections, a campaign which the SDLP opposes, Eastwood is strident: “There is a Labour Party in Northern Ireland, and it’s the SDLP.” The SDLP in Westminster, he asserts, is “in the lobbies with the Labour Party a lot, lot more than we’re not – almost always”.

“We will work, and do work, extremely closely with the Labour Party, and would like to support a Labour government,” he adds. “You can either have that, or you can threaten to dilute the offering that we might have at an election, potentially split votes, and have more DUP MPs, or Sinn Fein MPs who don’t come.”

Besides the practical concern over vote splitting, Eastwood also has a more political critique of the Northern Ireland Labour Party, saying that “the problem that Northern Ireland Labour have is that they don’t want to have a position on the national question, and we do”. He suggests that in the next decade “a lot of political discussion will be about the constitutional future” and that the SDLP, when approaching those discussions, will “ground our arguments in social democracy”.

“From the perspective we’re coming at, we want people to be more prosperous, want a fairer society, and I think constitutional change can be, will be, positive towards that,” he says. “I just don’t believe you can opt out the future, can opt out of that conversation when it is clearly coming.”

Eastwood clearly has little time for questions of internal Labour politics. “You do focus an awful lot on the factions,” he tells me when asked where he would place himself politically within the party. “I’m on the centre left of politics. I’m not on the far left, I wouldn’t be on the right of the Labour Party. I’d be – what do you call it, soft left?” Pausing, he concludes: “Yous are all weird.”

Ultimately, he says, “a Labour government is better than a Tory government, and nothing else matters, you’ve got to unite around that, and I think you’re really seeing that [at conference] this week”. He explains: “People are clearly deciding whatever differences they might have with Keir Starmer or whatever else, they’re uniting behind the party, and I’ve been impressed to see that.”