The Social Democratic Party streaked like a meteor across the political firmament, before, in its final Owenite version, it crashed in ignominious farce. How did the SDP happen and what was its legacy?
Labour’s former deputy leader, Denis Healey, blamed the SDP for Margaret Thatcher’s election victories in 1983 and 1987, and for delaying the Labour party’s recovery ‘by nearly 10 years’. By contrast, Roy Jenkins, one of the SDP’s founders and its first leader, claimed that, though it did not ‘break the mould’ of British politics, it helped drag the Labour party back ‘from the wilder shores of lunacy and arrogance’. However, the two historians of the party’s short life, Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, argue that, despite making the most serious challenge to the two party system for 50 years, the SDP, in the end, made ‘no discernable impact’.
The birth of the SDP and its astonishing initial success certainly seemed very important at the time. I was a close ally of its founders, especially the charismatic Shirley Williams and the organisational supremo of the right, Bill Rodgers. I had been parliamentary private secretary to Shirley Williams when she was secretary of state of education and was a friend and neighbour of Bill Rodgers. Inevitably, I was much involved in the events leading up to the SDP breakaway.
Although Roy Jenkins, the then-president of the European commission, had made a much-publicised Dimbleby lecture in November 1979 in which he had called for ‘the strengthening of the radical centre’, the key figures, if there was to be a breakaway party, were Williams, Rodgers, and the former foreign secretary, David Owen, because they were still leading players in the Labour party. The Gang of Three, as they became known, had already openly expressed their concern about Labour’s lurch to the left following Thatcher’s 1979 election victory, and had raised the possibility of a breakaway. But the turning point was the 1980 Blackpool conference, at which Tony Benn was at his most demagogic, and the right suffered defeat after defeat, including over the European community and unilateralism. Like the Gang of Three, I too despaired over what was happening, but argued that those on the centre right ought to stay and fight within the party.
My reasons were in part emotional. Influenced by the former leader, the revisionist Hugh Gaitskell, I had joined the Labour party out of conviction in my early 20s, and did not see why I should now have to abandon it to the Bennites and the Trots. From my knowledge of continental European politics, I also drew the practical conclusion that, when the left was split, the right was almost always in power. And, if the potential defectors, like Williams and Rodgers, were pessimistic about Labour’s future, the majority of centre-right MPs believed there was still a chance that the party could be brought to its senses, though, as I told Shirley at a lunch of her three former PPS’s, ‘it will take time’.
The election of Michael Foot as leader of the Labour party in November 1980, and the shambolic Wembley special conference in January 1981 (on the mechanics of the electoral college to choose a leader), provided the ideal launch pad for the new party. On January 25, a new Council for Social Democracy was set up and the so-called Limehouse declaration was published, in which the Gang of Four (Owen, Williams and Rodgers were now joined by Roy Jenkins) put the case for a realignment of British politics. The new party, the SDP, was speedily launched on March 26 in a blaze of media publicity.
1981 was a wonderful year to be creating a new political party. The Conservative government had become increasingly unpopular, with Thatcher being the least well-regarded prime minister since polling began. Labour, led by the ineffective Michael Foot and wracked throughout much of 1981 by a divisive deputy leadership election campaign between Denis Healey and Tony Benn, slipped from 46 per cent in January’s Gallop poll to 23 per cent by December – the biggest fall by any party in any one year. Following its launch, the SDP and the Liberals, now combined in a new Alliance, moved into second place, and, after the party conference season and brilliant by-election results, including Shirley Williams’ spectacular victory at Crosby, actually went ahead with over 50 per cent of the poll. A third-party surge on this scale and duration had never been seen before.
Compared with the heady triumphs of 1981, the result of the June 1983 election was a big disappointment for the SDP. Thatcher, boosted by the Falklands war, won a smashing victory. The Labour vote collapsed, but the SDP and the Liberals, although together they put up the best third-party performance since the 1920s, were blocked by the first-past-the-post system and failed to break through.
Despite another good result under David Owen in the 1987 general election, by the autumn of that year the SDP had disintegrated amidst acrimony and bitterness between David Owen and the other three founders.
Despite the SDP’s failure, both Healey and Jenkins agreed that it had had a big impact. The Healey argument, that it led to Thatcher’s election victories and held back Labour’s recovery, now seems exaggerated, though I believed it at the time. The strong performance of the SDP–Liberal Alliance in both the 1983 and 1987 elections may have increased the size of the Tory majorities. But it is difficult to see how a Labour party led by Michael Foot (as in 1983) or any unreformed Labour party (as in 1987) could actually have won an election in the 1980s.
Things might possibly have been different if Healey instead of Foot had become leader of the Labour party in 1981. Indeed, the SDP breakaway would probably have not have taken place at all. Even if Thatcher had won in 1983, it would probably have been by a much narrower margin, leaving Labour well placed both to modernise itself and then to stage a political comeback at least one election, or possibly two, before it finally did so in 1997. A Healey leadership is one of the might-have-beens of Labour history.
The Jenkins’ argument that the creation of the SDP assisted the process of modernisation inside the Labour party has some merit to it. In their laudable quest to make Labour a more tolerant organisation, Foot and Kinnock were now able to make the argument that, if the centre right inside the Labour party was pressed too hard, it had somewhere else to go. The initial success of the SDP also demonstrated clearly that, if Labour became extreme, it would lose votes in the centre. However, most of Labour’s key reforms came after 1987, when the SDP was no longer a threat.
So it is now my view that it was Labour’s successive election defeats – 1983, 1987 and 1992 – which provided the spur to change and enabled first Neil Kinnock and then John Smith, and above all Tony Blair, to transform Labour into a modern social democratic party. If I am right, it was more the ballot box than the SDP which made Labour accept that it had to change.