Some lessons of the SDP for labour’s present predicament

Jeremy Corbyn’s election and re-election as Labour leader, together with the emergence of a new Conservative Prime Minister committed to Brexit, has led to renewed speculation about the possibility of a new party appealing to the ‘politically homeless’ in the centre and centreleft of British politics. This article draws lessons from the SDP experience in the early 1980s. Are the structural conditions more favourable to the progressive centre-left now than they were then? Is there the sociological, electoral and ideological space for a new party? Does first past the post remain an insuperable barrier to an electoral breakthrough? From whom and in what circumstances might the leadership for a new party come? For all the depth of Labour’s current problems, a new party seems an unlikely immediate prospect. In 1981, the SDP made a major miscalculation about the irreversibility of Labour’s decline. However, the process of fragmentation in British politics seems set to continue.

Duke Scholars

Author Rodger Alan Liddle Medicine, Gastroenterology