Thirty years ago this month, Tony Benn’s diary recorded his thoughts a couple of days after the launch of the new Social Democratic party. ‘It is unreal and potentially dangerous. It reminds me of what Tawney said. The attack on the two-party system, the attack on the democratic process, the attack on choice, the attack on debate, the attack on policy – all of these have within them the ingredients of fascism,’ he wrote.

Benn’s reaction – from one who was at least as much to blame for the split in the party as those who left it – contained more than a hint of hyperbole, but it reflects how many in Labour’s ranks lashed out at the Gang of Four.

The charge sheet has been well rehearsed. By splitting the centre-left vote, the SDP helped to ensure the nightmare of Thatcherism was inflicted on the country for longer – 10 years by Denis Healey’s count – than it need have been. It’s certainly arguable that Labour’s climb out of the electoral pit into which it fell in 1983 after the split was so steep as to have made Neil Kinnock’s task in 1987 and 1992 near impossible.

But the reality is that the reasons for Labour’s unpopularity in the 1980s – its nonsensical defence and Europe policies, ‘the alternative economic strategy’, and the infiltration of far-left activists – were the very reasons that those who left felt, in the words of Shirley Williams, that ‘the party I loved and worked for over so many years no longer exists.’

But while the role of the SDP in Labour’s defeats should not be overestimated, it is a stretch to claim, as Bill Rodgers did, that the SDP was ‘the main reason for the modernisation of the Labour party’. The reality, as Ivor Crewe and Anthony King’s masterful history of the SDP argues, was that ‘the wholesale recasting of Labour policy owed almost nothing to the SDP’. Much of it occurred after 1987 when the SDP had effectively ceased to exist. In short, New Labour policy was ‘internally generated, not plagiarised’.

The circumstances may be very different, but the anger many in the party’s ranks feel now at the Liberal Democrats’ coalition with David Cameron mirrors the feelings of betrayal of 30 years ago. But, as then, the real challenge for Labour is not to exhaust its energies hating the third party, but to craft a credible appeal to many of those who routinely vote Tory. And, as was the case in 1981, Labour cannot absolve itself of all responsibility for its predicament. Promises made in 1997 on electoral reform were not kept and its decision to resile on its manifesto commitment on the AV referendum does it little credit. At the same time, like some of those who defected to the SDP, Nick Clegg appears to take a special delight in attacking Labour, while the palpable discomfort of the likes of David Steel, Charles Kennedy and Ming Campbell at the coalition’s actions underline just how far their party has strayed from its core values.

The ‘attack on the two-party system’ lamented by Benn in 1981 has, of course, nothing to do with fascism but everything to do with the acceptance of pluralism. If AV is adopted next month, it’s a lesson Labour will have to wake up to pretty fast. AV may not, as its critics suggest, lead to more hung parliaments, but the search for second preferences will require parties to shed the kind of tribalism that the two-party system represents.

Photo: Shirley Williams