February 1974: the general election which changed Northern Ireland politics

It is 50 years since Parliament was dissolved ahead of an early general election: that contest was the first sign of major changes in the party structure of the UK

Today (8 February) is the 50th anniversary of the dissolution of the 1970 Parliament. I realise that may not strike you as a momentous event, and it most ways it’s not. It isn’t even the most important or exciting thing to happen that month: a group of British detectives seized Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs in Rio de Janeiro; Mel Brooks’s cowboy spoof Blazing Saddles premiered in California; and the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai formally renounced Confucius as a reactionary influence. What a time to be alive.

One small quirk of constitutional interest is that the dissolution of Parliament, requested by Edward Heath, was not granted as would be conventional by Her Majesty The Queen. The sovereign was in New Zealand, where she had been at the Commonwealth Games which were being held in Christchurch. The proclamation dissolving Parliament was therefore issued in the names of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother and The Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, who had been appointed counsellors of state the previous month to undertake specific formal duties while the Queen was not in the country.

Counsellors of state are appointed by Letters Patent under the Great Seal under the Regency Act 1937 (though the Queen Mother’s eligibility was provided for in the Regency Act 1953) and can carry out several of the monarch’s functions like attending meetings of the Privy Council, signing documents and receiving new ambassadors. Some functions, including dissolving Parliament, can only be carried out by counsellors of state if granted explicit permission, but the Palace had clearly had sufficient warning and foresight from Downing Street to include this provision in 1974. The counsellors always include the spouse of the monarch and the first four people in the line of succession, provided they are British subjects over the age of 21 (or 18 for the heir apparent or presumptive), domiciled in the United Kingdom and not disqualified from becoming monarch. Additional counsellors can be added, now under the provisions of the Counsellors of State Act 2022.

There has been some interest in the role of counsellors of state since the announcement on Monday that the King is being treated for a form of cancer. He has cancelled public engagements and is likely to curtail travel for the time being, but there is no suggestion that he will be in any way incapacitated. Nevertheless, there are one or two ticklish issues about the current roster of counsellors. It includes the Duke of Sussex, but one of the criteria is that the person is domiciled in some part of the United Kingdom. The duke currently lives in California, but domicile is a common law concept which does not have a specific meaning. The explanatory notes to the Counsellors of State Bill put it like this.

Everyone receives a domicile at birth; this is known as a ‘domicile of origin’. Every independent person can at any time change their domicile of origin and acquire a ‘domicile of choice’ by the fact of residing in a country other than that of their domicile of origin with the intention of continuing to reside there indefinitely. There is a strong presumption against a change from a domicile of origin to a domicile of choice.

The duke’s current residence is not, therefore, automatically a disqualification from being “domiciled” in the United Kingdom.

Prince Andrew also falls within the scope of counsellor of state, but has withdrawn from royal duties after accusations of serious sexual misconduct. Additionally, the list includes Princess Beatrice, his elder daughter, who is ninth in line to the throne, but does not normally perform any official duties (she is vice-president for partnerships and strategy at US software firm Afiniti).

In any event, the dissolution of February 1974 was noteworthy for being authorised by counsellors of state rather than the sovereign. There is one other aspect of the general election of February 1974 which it seemed timely to mention in this week after the restoration of the Northern Ireland Executive. Fifty years ago there was also a newly established power-sharing government: after elections to a new assembly in June 1973, a 11-member executive was formed under the terms of the Sunningdale Agreement and took office on 1 January 1974. It comprised ministers from the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) in voluntary coalition (unlike the modern executive), with the addition of the leader of the non-sectarian Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, Oliver Napier, as “Legal Minister and Head of the Office of Law Reform”.

(Justice was devolved to the current executive in April 2010 but the minister of justice is appointed by a cross-community vote of the assembly, unlike other ministers. Two of the three holders of the office since that time, David Ford and Naomi Long, have been drawn from the Alliance. The exception was Claire Sugden, an independent Unionist who had been co-opted to the assembly and was appointed minister of justice aged just 29 in May 2016, stepping down in March 2017 when a new election was held for the assembly.)

Chief executive of the devolved body was the UUP leader Brian Faulkner, who had been the 6th and last prime minister of Northern Ireland from March 1971 to March 1972, when the government had been suspended. He had attended St Columba’s College, a Church of Ireland school in Rathfarnham, near Dublin, where he had been friends with Michael Yeats, son of the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats. He had returned to Northern Ireland to attend Queen’s University, Belfast, though he withdrew from his law course after the beginning of the Second World War to work in his family’s shirt-making business. Although once a favourite of the UUP’s hardline anti-Catholic wing, he had tried to improve relations between the two communities after he became prime minister, but by then it was too late. The security situation was deteriorating rapidly, the SDLP began a boycott of the Northern Ireland Parliament and Faulkner’s introduction of internment was counter-productive.

The deputy chief executive was Gerry Fitt, the leader of the SDLP. He had been elected to Belfast City Council for the Irish Labour Party in 1958, then won Belfast Dock from the UUP in the Northern Ireland House of Commons, becoming the only Labour member. From 1966 to 1983 he also sat in the Westminster Parliament for West Belfast. Fitt became a leading figure in the civil rights movement and in 1970 became the first leader of the SDLP, created to unite the various elements of civil rights advocates, Irish nationalists and representatives of the labour movement but rejecting the violent tactics of the IRA.

In addition to the chief executive and deputy chief executive, there were five UUP ministers and three from the SDLP (including future leader and Nobel laureate John Hume, who was minister of commerce). But the UUP had been deeply divided on whether to participate in the executive at all: its Standing Committee approved the party’s involvement by only 132 to 105 in October 1973. At the end of the executive;s first week, on Friday 4 January, its policy-making body, the Ulster Unionist Council, met and voted against the Sunningdale Agreement’s proposed Council of Ireland by 427 to 374. Faulkner resigned as UUP leader the following Monday, remaining as chief executive, and on 22 January, Harry West, a farmer from Fermanagh in the south-west who had been a strident critic of the agreement, was elected in his place.

The executive was in fact virtually stillborn. As Unionist opinion against it hardened, seeing some of the provisions of the Sunningdale Agreement as Trojan horses for a united Ireland, it clearly had no future: a two-week general strike by Protestants in May 1974, organised by the Ulster Workers’ Council and the Ulster Army Council, caused Faulkner to resign on 28 May, and direct rule from Westminster was reimposed. It would be another quarter-century until devolved government returned after the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998; the SDLP’s deputy leader, Seamus Mallon, mordantly described the new institutions as “Sunningdale for slow learners”.

The general election of 28 February 1974 took place against this backdrop, and it was significant in Northern Ireland terms. For the first time since the creation of the state in 1921, the MPs it returned to the House of Commons at Westminster were not dominated by a UUP which was, in effect, a branch of the Conservative Party, taking the Conservative whip. They had relinquished that after the suspension of the Stormont Parliament in 1972, although the party remained affiliated to the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations until 1985.

In 1970, Northern Ireland had elected eight Ulster Unionists, two “Unity” MPs, Bernadette Devlin and Frank McManus, who were left-wing nationalists, one Protestant Unionist Party MP, Rev. Ian Paisley, and Gerry Fitt for the Republican Labour Party (the SDLP was formed two months later). The UUP Members were still regarded as a reliable part of the Conservative bloc in the Commons. The MP for Londonderry, Robin Chichester-Clark, whose elder brother James was prime minister of Northern Ireland, had been in the House since 1955. He had served in the Whips’ Office from 1957 to 1964 then served on the front bench in opposition under Edward Heath, speaking on the arts and Northern Ireland. The recently retired MP for South Antrim, Sir Knox Cunningham, was Harold Macmillan’s parliamentary private secretary from 1959 to 1963.

By 1974, all that had changed. Seven UUP Members were returned, including party leader Harry West: he was elected for Fermanagh and South Tyrone with a majority of more than 10,000 but would lose the seat in the year’s second election in October and never returned to the House of Commons, though he was the UUP candidate in the same seat again at the by-election in April 1981 which was won by serving prisoner and convicted IRA terrorist Bobby Sands, then nearly six weeks into the hunger strike which would kill him. But those UUP MPs were no longer part of the Conservative group.

There were three MPs representing the Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party, formed in 1972 by former minister of home affairs William Craig from Ulster Unionists opposed to Brian Faulkner’s leadership. Vanguard was a fiercely Unionist party which advocated very tough measures against the Provisional IRA and at terms skirted the edges of paramilitary fascism. Craig was elected in East Belfast, while the Rev. Robert Bradford, a former footballer who had become a Methodist minister, won South Belfast, while John Dunlop defeated Bernadette Devlin in Mid-Ulster. Other members of Vanguard outside Westminster included David Trimble, assistant dean of the Faculty of Law at Queen’s University, Belfast, who acted as legal adviser to the Ulster Workers’ Council in the general strike later that year, and Reg Empey, the party’s vice-chairman, who would be leader of the UUP from 2005 to 2010.

Ian Paisley had by then founded the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and was its sole representative in the Commons, holding the North Antrim seat which he had taken in 1970 and would occupy for 40 years, before handing it on to his son Ian Paisley Jr. Meanwhile Gerry Fitt was the only nationalist MP of the 12 returned from Northern Ireland.

Less than four years separate the general elections of June 1970 and February 1974, but for Westminster the landscape had transformed. The signs had been there in 1970: the civil rights movement of the mid-1960s and the inability of the Protestant-dominated Royal Ulster Constabulary had led to James Callaghan, as home secretary responsible for overall security, agreeing to the deployment of British soldiers to Northern Ireland on 14-15 August 1969. (It marked the beginning of Operation Banner, the British Army’s longest continuous deployment in its history at nearly 38 years.)

Nevertheless, when the United Kingdom went to the polls, Northern Ireland was an issue which barely impinged on voters in Britain. The Conservative and Liberal manifestos spared the province a paragraph, while Labour managed one and a half. No-one could say that by 1974. The situation, of course in Northern Ireland but very specifically too on the green benches of the House of Commons, was changed, changed utterly (to borrow a phrase). The parties in Northern Ireland seem more distant than ever from mainstream UK politics. The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998 had the strange effect, in the long term, of shattering the moderate UUP and SDLP, allowing the hardline Protestants of the DUP and Sinn Féin, literally the publicity wing of a terrorist organisation, to seize power.

Labour is in a strange position. There is an entity called the Labour Party in Northern Ireland, but it is not a registered political party and does not contest elections. Until 2003, Northern Ireland residents could not even apply for membership of the Labour Party, being encouraged instead to join the SDLP, which informally voted with Labour in the House of Commons. This was hardly an exact equivalence, as the SDLP was and is an avowedly Nationalist party and differs from Labour on issues like abortion and religious education. Even when the outright ban was lifted on legal advice, Northern Ireland members of the Labour Party cannot stand for election since the LPNI does not contest them but it is a breach of party rules to support another party. Eight members registered a new party, the Northern Ireland Labour Representation Committee, in 2016 and contested that year’s elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly. The party’s response was to threaten them with expulsion, while it expelled another member the following year for standing as a “Cross-Community Labour Alternative”. The LPNI continues to protest that the policy of non-participation imposed by Labour’s National Executive Committee is an infringement of its members’ human rights.

The Conservatives for many years harboured a kind of psychic wound at their split with the UUP. Margaret Thatcher was instinctively a Unionist of some fervour, and her shadow Northern Ireland secretary from 1975 to 1979, Airey Neave, had devised a policy of radical integrationism which would abandon devolution, focus instead on reforming Northern Ireland local government and pursue a military solution against Republican terrorists. But he was murdered by the Irish National Liberation Army at Westminster in March 1979, just five weeks before Thatcher became prime minister. Thereafter, despite her instincts, Thatcher’s government adopted the position of an increasingly neutral (and often exasperated) referee in Northern Ireland.

When she signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement in November 1985, which gave the Irish government a formal consultative role in Northern Ireland, it was rejected by the UUP and the DUP: their 15 MPs resigned from the House of Commons to force by-elections, 14 being re-elected. A rally was held outside Belfast City Hall which some said numbered half a million, and Paisley thundered to the crowd:

Mrs Thatcher tells us that that Republic must have some say in our Province. We say never, never, never, never!

Enoch Powell, then Ulster Unionist MP for South Down, was icy in the House of Commons but no less furious.

Does the right hon. Lady understand—if she does not yet understand she soon will—that the penalty for treachery is to fall into public contempt?

In December 1993, John Major, together with the Irish taoiseach Albert Reynolds, issued the Joint Declaration on Peace, commonly referred to as the Downing Street Declaration. It contained a momentous phrase, declaring that the British government had “no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland”. On one level this was just an extension of the acknowledgement that the will of the people of Northern Ireland would determine the province’s constitutional status, but it was more than that: it declared the government of the United Kingdom neutral in principle on its own territorial integrity, declining even to express an opinion or a preference, let alone imposing that preference on Northern Ireland.

After this it was hard to argue that the Conservative Party was in any meaningful sense a Unionist party when it came to Northern Ireland. It would and did express very strongly its support for the Union between England and Scotland, as witnessed during the 2014 referendum, but in Northern Ireland it made a point of taking no view. Individual Conservative MPs might be passionate supporters of the Union, and indeed there was the strange if brief spectacle of Andrew Hunter, MP for Basingstoke, who had withdrawn from the Conservative Party in 2002, formally becoming a DUP Member in December 2004. He stood down from the House of Commons at the 2005 general election but remains the last mainland representative of a political party based in Northern Ireland.

David Cameron, as leader of the opposition, made a final attempt to heal the breach. A tiny Conservative Party of Northern Ireland had first organised in 1989, and at the 1992 general election, its candidate in North Down, Laurence Kennedy, had come a close second to the incumbent Ulster Popular Unionist Party MP Jim Kilfedder, a barrister who had been born in Country Leitrim and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. In 2007, the former first minister of Northern Ireland, Lord Trimble, announced that he was taking the Conservative whip in the House of Lords, “to be more involved in national politics”. He added that, while he would not campaign against the UUP, he believed in broader terms there should be:

some form of realignment bringing all the national parties to compete for the votes of the people here [in Northern Ireland]. Part of that realignment could be the recreation of the historic relationship between the Conservatives and the Ulster Unionists.

In the summer of 2008, Cameron and the UUP leader, Sir Reg Empey, wrote jointly in The Daily Telegraph to announce the creation of a “joint working group to explore the possibilities of closer cooperation leading to the creation of a new political and electoral force in Northern Ireland”. The following year they unveiled an alliance registered as Ulster Conservatives and Unionists—New Force (UCUNF), under which banner Jim Nicholson of the UUP retained his seat in the European Parliament in June. In February 2010, nine candidates for Northern Ireland’s 18 seats at the forthcoming general election were selected, but the UUP’s only incumbent, Lady Hermon (North Down), left the party the following month, unwilling to part of an alliance with the Conservatives, and sat as an independent. She would hold the seat until retiring in 2019.

None of the candidates was elected to the House of Commons in 2010, despite the Conservatives becoming the largest party and forming a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Empey was succeeded as leader of the UUP in September by Tom Elliott, MLA for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, whose preference was for his party to retain its separate status and identity but, as happened before 1972, to take the Conservative whip at Westminster. The UCUNF label was not used at the 2011 Northern Ireland Assembly elections, and later that year the Conservative Party co-chairman, Lord Feldman, made a final offer to the UUP:

A full merger of two political parties, each with their own history and traditions while sharing a common culture of centre-right ideas and beliefs. Under our proposed terms, Ulster Unionists, as part of the new party, would have had a voice at the centre of the Conservative Party, a seat on the Party Board, the chance to vote for the Leader of the Conservative Party, and full access to the campaigning resources of the Party.

The UUP rejected the offer. Consequently, on 31 January 2012, the Conservatives were reorganised as the Conservative and Unionist Party of Northern Ireland. They quickly rebranded that June as Northern Ireland Conservatives, described by the Northern Ireland secretary, Owen Patterson, as “a fresh, pro-Union, centre-right party, which is proudly and distinctively Northern Irish”. But it remains a tiny party, with no elected representatives. It won 0.7 per cent of the vote at the 2019 general election, and only 0.03 per cent at the 2022 elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly.

We are left, then, with a status quo in which the main UK political parties have effectively placed a cordon sanitaire around Northern Ireland, leaving local politics to local parties. It is hard to envision the circumstances under which this will change: the Cameron-era Conservative/UUP alliance was the most wholehearted attempt to “normalise” Northern Ireland politics and link it to the UK scene. Seeds were sown earlier, but the first major step was the general election of February 1974.