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Social Democratic Party (Uk)The Social Democratic Party (SDP) was a United Kingdom political party which existed between 1981 and 1990. It was founded as a split from the Labour Party and was led by Roy Jenkins. It entered into an electoral alliance with the Liberal Party in the 1983 general election and the 1987 general election, and formally merged with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats in 1988. History Foundation It was created in 1981 by a breakaway group from the right wing of the Labour Party who opposed the leftward shift in Labour policy following the election of Michael Foot, and the involvement of trade unions in choosing the leader of the Labour party. They argued that a new political force was needed to challenge the Conservative Party, and the leader of that party should be elected by its entire membership, rather than the electoral college now in use in the Labour party. But before all this, Roy Jenkins had given a keynote speech - that year's Dimbleby Lecture - as he finished his time working for the European Commission, whereupon he called upon the necessity for a realignment in British politics, and whether such a concept should be done around the existing Liberal Party, or from a new grouping based on Social Democratic principals similar to other European states. There was also long-running claims of corruption and administrative decay within Labour at local level, whereupon able MPs of many years could be deselected by those wanting to put either their friends or members of their own Labour faction (in particular Militant) into a safe seat. Eddie Milne on Teeside and Dick Taverne in Lincoln were both victims of this intrigue during the 1970s, and in both cases they fought for their seats again as independent candidates (in Taverne's case he resigned his seat to force a by-election to highlight the issue), & won. Militant - aided & abetted by the Socialist Workers Party - were systematically targetting weak local party branches in safe seat areas in order to have their own candidates selected, and thus inevitably become MPs. Many members of the future Social Democratic Party were members of the Manifesto Group within the Labour Party, and the final straw for them appeared to be the behaviour of Denis Healey at a meeting with them during the leadership campaign to replace Jim Callaghan, bluntly telling the assembled to vote for him "because you haven't really got any choice, have you?" The arrogance of the remark - whereupon they were expected to back him simply as the lesser of two perceived evils - proved enough for many to feel that perhaps their days as members of the Labour Party were now over (one notable exception was future Scottish Secretary George Robertson, whom openly refused to join the new party because he feared he would not be able to keep his seat at a General Election - earning him the nickname of "Chicken George" thereafter). The founding members or "gang of four", Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rodgers, and Shirley Williams were leading figures on the Labour Right. They announced the new party at a press conference and outlined their policies in the "Limehouse declaration" http://www.liberalhistory.org.uk/record.jsp?type=page&ID=176&limehouse%20declaration. From the outset, the SDP's central purpose was in question: whether its alliance with the Liberal Party would lead to a merged party, or that the two parties were destined to compete with each other. This was not a public issue in the first year, but became increasingly serious. 28 Labour MPs joined the new party, along with one member of the Conservative Party, Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler. Williams and Jenkins were not at the time MPs, but were elected to the Commons in by-elections at Crosby and Glasgow Hillhead respectively. (Jenkins also unsuccessfully contested a by-election at Warrington in March 1982 before winning election from Glasgow Hillhead one year later, despite a dirty tricks campaign that involved standing another candidate, also called Roy Jenkins, to contest the seat in the hope of splitting his vote) The formation of the Alliance The SDP formed the SDP-Liberal Alliance with the Liberal Party late in 1981, under the joint leadership of Roy Jenkins (SDP) and David Steel (Lib). Initially, the Alliance achieved considerable success in parliamentary by-elections and, at one point, an opinion poll rating of over 50%. In early 1982, after public disagreements over who could fight which seats in the forthcoming election, the poll rating dipped, but was still well ahead of the Conservatives, and far ahead of Labour, who embarrassingly lost one of their ten safest seats - Bermondsey - in a by-election in early 1983 to Liberal-SDP candidate Simon Hughes & which has remained in their hands ever since (the local Labour MP - Bob Mellish - had resigned over similar circumstances to that of Dick Taverne in Lincoln). Following victory in the Falklands War of March to June 1982, the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher gained popularity, and the standing of the Alliance and Labour declined. The Alliance did well in the 1983 general election, running Labour very close, winning 25% of the national vote (to Labour's 28%) but only secured 23 MPs, only six of whom were members of the SDP. In 1987, with the SDP now under the leadership of David Owen, the Alliance's share of the vote fell slightly and the SDP's parlimentary party was reduced from eight members to five. (Mike Hancock had won a by-election at Portsmouth South in 1985 and Rosie Barnes had won a bitterly contested by-election in 1987 at Greenwich - on both occasions these were former Labour seats where the local party had been taken over by the Militant tendancy. Proposed merger After the disappointment of 1987, Steel proposed a formal merger of the two parties. He was fiercely opposed by Owen, but the majority of the SDP membership agreed to the union. Owen resigned as leader and was replaced by Robert Maclennan. Steel and Maclennan headed the new "Social and Liberal Democrat Party" (SLD) from March 3, 1988 (who were re-named the Liberal Democrats in October 1989). Many SDP members and SDP MP (and future Leader of the Liberal Democrats) Charles Kennedy joined Maclennan in the merged Liberal Democrat party. But Owen remained defiantly at the head of the newly re-established and much reduced SDP, along with two other MPs, John Cartwright and Rosie Barnes. The Owenite rump Although the rump SDP beat the other parties to second place behind William Hague in the Richmond by-election in 1989, by 1990 they finished behind the Official Monster Raving Loony Party in the Bootle by-election. Within a week Owen had announced the end of the party. A small number of SDP activists carried on without David Owen under the SDP name for several years, after the official demise of the party in 1990. The rump SDP finished fourth at the Neath By-election in 1991, and they were to hold a number of council seats in Yorkshire and South Wales throughout the 1990s. To this day the occasional Social Democratic Party candidate pops up in the odd council election, and there have been occasions when they have won. A "Social Democratic Party" is officially listed on the Register of Political Parties for England, Scotland and Wales only; the cited leader is a John Bates. Effects It has been argued by some that the creation of the SDP led eventually to Tony Blair's movement of the Labour Party back towards the political centre, and the creation of New Labour. But those Labour moderates who remained in the party, such as Roy Hattersley, argue that the split in the centre-left both aided the Conservatives and delayed the move of the Labour Party to a centrist position. The more cynical point out that those "moderates" that stayed did so more out of fear of losing their seats (eg. George Robertson) than loyalty (particularly Hattersley, whose marginal Birmingham seat explained much about his ever swinging opinions, particularly on immigration), and a large part of Labour's parliamentary group were known to automatically swing whatever way the leadership wanted or public opinion demanded in order not to fall foul of either: as events post-1983 proved, the old style Labour Party had a very bad habit of "blood-letting", purges and scapegoating within its own ranks whenever faced with electoral defeat. There was little anyone could have done to stop the Conservatives winning in 1983 thanks to the sense of jingoism within Britain caused by the Falklands War, and Labour did not help itself by spending most of its time trying to squash electoral rivals like the SDP/Liberal Alliance over the next decade rather than concentrate its attacks on the government. Many of Tony Blair's advisors - and indeed Blair himself - were the same people advocating those policies that years later they were to claim were responsible for Labours defeat in the General Election of 1983. If the Social Democratic Party is said to have achieved anything, it was to help restore the political credibilty of the Liberals - basking in the reflected glow of the national status of Roy Jenkins (former Chancellor, Home & Foreign Secretary) & David Owen (former Foreign Secretary that had been widely tipped as a future Labour Prime Minister) - as being something more than a source of shock by-election results and a party for those living in quaint ultra-rural areas such as the Highlands and Cornwall. They also introduced a large amount of media awareness that the Liberals (still reeling from the embarrassing publicity surrounding the High Court trial of former leader Jeremy Thorpe) were badly lacking. More to the point, they proved what the National Front had shown to be feasible in the 1970s - that a brand new party outside of the major two, mainly reliant on members' subscriptions & fundraising rather than business backing (the SDP had Sainsburys, but they were a shadow of the strength they & other supermarkets were to be in the 1990s under Blair) could fight elections anywhere in the country, and win. Leaders of the Social Democratic Party, 1982-1988 See also: Politics of the United Kingdom
The Social Democratic Party was also the official name of the Social Democratic Federation after 1907. External Links
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