It's fascinating to watch the way two separate sets of election campaigns use each other as the bogey man without either of them having the slightest effect on the other. Sinn Féin and the SDLP's material is openly directed at the DUP while both UUP and DUP direct their fire at Sinn Féin. Both sets of protagonists lock horns in parallel universes. All the evidence suggests that at most there's a one per cent transfer across the divide in voting preferences.
Even that is probably the result of mistakes by voters.
Thus the extraordinary DUP campaign concentrating on the prospect of Gerry Kelly becoming the north's minister of justice will neither deprive SF of a single vote nor add one. The SDLP offers two reasons for voting SDLP: Ian Mor and Ian Og. What? Neither Paisley is an opponent of the SDLP in this election any more than Gerry Kelly is an opponent of the DUP.
It's all a sham. Vote for us and we'll save you from the bogey man. Does anyone believe that?
The DUP's opponent is Trimble and in true DUP tradition their election campaign consists of a tissue of lies and horror stories with Trimble the villain.
Their election material is stuffed with emotive words: 'betrayal, damage, defenceless, destroyed, terrorists released, terrorists in government, Dublin interference' and, wait for it, 'all-Ireland government'. If a quarter of it were true Sinn Féin could go out of business on November 26 with all their political aims achieved. Of course not a word of it is true. Peter Robinson even admitted to the BBC that he doesn't believe the DUP's central scare story, Gerry Kelly as justice minister, can happen in the next four years.
So can nationalists do anything except gawp in amazement as the cowardy-custard UUP either run scared of the DUP's lying campaign or begin to utter the same lies themselves about the agreement they're supposed to support, go 'DUP-lite' as Mark Durkan said? Well in fact they can do something. They can use the PR electoral system. Take north Belfast. Billy Hutchinson is in danger of being squashed between DUP lies and scare-mongering on the one hand and UUP cowardice and bigotry on the other. Together with the guaranteed nationalist vote in the constituency that will leave Hutchinson struggling for fifth or sixth place on the first count. If he is eliminated, the paradox is that his transfers will probably elect the second DUP candidate.
A paradox because Hutchinson is pro-agreement and says so, the exact opposite of where the DUP is.
It's paradoxical in other ways too. The DUP and PUP try to attract many of the same voters in the same districts, the DUP with much greater success, despite the fact that the DUP's policies can only damage the prospects of the people who vote for them. Over 40 per cent of DUP and PUP voters live in poverty and have poor, or no educational qualifications. Of all the pro-union parties only the PUP addresses those issues.
PUP material repeatedly hammers away at the damage the 11-plus does to working-class children from Protestant families, pointing out that in loyalist Belfast about one per cent passes and a teenager going to university is as rare as hen's teeth.
DUP material however is a piece of pure nonsense. It says 'more needs to be done... to lift the educational attainments of all our children... Martin McGuinness abolished the 11-plus. Republicans would destroy our grammar schools as well.' This despite the fact that almost none of their voters' children in north or west Belfast go to grammar schools and that the DUP's non-policy on education completely betrays their voters. But hey, if the PUP supports abolishing the 11-plus, then they must support Sinn Féin. Too hard to follow? In the absence of logic take up the DUP chant: treachery, deceit, dishonesty, sell out, appeasement, concession, No, No, No. They never lost a vote by under-estimating the stupidity of their voters.
If you reject fanaticism and fundamentalism you can give candidates like Hutchinson across the north a preference. It might keep them in there until some lunatic from the DUP or an even weirder fringe unionist is eliminated. You mightn't like Hutchinson or that the PUP is the UVF's front party, but bear in mind the alternative for urban loyalist districts. Thirty years of voting for the DUP has produced an impoverished wasteland in drug-ridden Ballymena.
At least with Hutchinson you know what you're getting whereas Trimble's gutless lot won't say whether they're pro-agreement or not in case the DUP attack them.
And don't worry, your preference for other pro-agreement candidates won't be counted until your first choice person is either elected or eliminated.
