Prospective new SDLP leader ‘looking forward to get stuck in if selected’

The prospective next leader of the SDLP has said she is daunted, but looking forward to getting stuck in if selected.

Claire Hanna, one of the party’s two MPs, confirmed at the weekend that she will put her name forward to become the next leader of the SDLP.

Current leader Colum Eastwood announced his resignation last week. He is to step down at the party’s conference in November.

He has already backed the 44-year-old South Belfast and Mid Down MP to succeed him.

Nominations to become the next leader will close on Friday.

Ms Hanna said she has worked very closely with Mr Eastwood, a fellow MP.

She also backed the SDLP stance of being the official Opposition at Stormont, and paid tribute to Opposition leader Matthew O’Toole as “doing an incredible job”.

“I’m not someone who thinks they have all the answers, it is daunting but I have been involved in the SDLP for many, many years and I have learnt a thing or two about the things that work in terms of organising people and in terms of motivating – so I’m looking forward to getting stuck in if that’s what the members decide,” she told BBC Radio Ulster’s Good Morning Ulster programme.

“There is a process to run. Applications are open until Friday.”

Ms Hanna described emerging from an “unbelievably topsy-turvy decade”.

“Colum was at the helm for nine years and we fought 10 elections so you were nearly always recovering from one or preparing for another, or dealing with some of the major twists and turns of Brexit, so the context is what is primarily different, that we have hopefully three years without an election,” she said.

“Politics for everybody has drifted so far away from its purpose, and people have lost faith – and sometimes elections become a way of sending a message, more a picking a team than maybe people being able to put their values in more centrally.”

The SDLP has seen a downturn in its fortunes since being the dominant nationalist party since its formation in 1970 to playing a major role in the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement in 1998 before falling behind Sinn Fein in the 2000s.

It currently has two MPs, eight MLAs and 59 councillors.

Ms Hanna said “humility is really important in political leadership”.

“I think humility is really important in political leadership – not to say, the people are wrong or they’re just not understanding it – to grasp that we’re not communicating it,” she said.

“Crucially a lot of it is about organisation,  a lot of it is about the fact that for a variety of reasons people haven’t had a knock on the door from the SDLP for a while, they haven’t had something from their door, they don’t see and know people in the community. In large part because the party has shrunk.

“When you have a couple of hundred councillors, then there is one in every neighbourhood and when you have fewer, there isn’t. That is a big part of it, the party was demoralised.

“It’s about motivating, giving the party a sense of purpose and motivation and it’s absolutely about going out and growing, recruiting new people.

“It’s largely structural. I did a big review of the SDLP in 2022, about our organisational capabilities and some of the deficits, and we have been working really hard with Colum and the whole party putting some of that in place.”

She added: “I know we need to clarify the message as well. This is a complicated place and quite often our answers to living in it have been complicated as well, and that doesn’t always fit the modern and fast paced political world that we live in.

“I know there is work to do, but I believe deeply in the SDLP mission of anti-sectarianism, being on the centre left and of a new Ireland, and I believe crucially that a lot of other people do as well.”