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It feels like I have just met a ghost. “This book bears a disconcerting resemblance to a biography of someone who showed early promise but died young”, so begins Ivor Crew and Anthony King’s doorstopper of a book on the SDP (a snip at £76). I too thought the SDP were dead. Dead, buried and ancient history. Monty Python parrot dead. But here’s the thing. A tall man in a neat dark blue suit has just walked into a trendy Soho brassiere and handed me his card. It bears the familiar (now retro looking) SDP logo on it. William Clouston, it reads. Party Leader. And he looks like flesh and blood to me.
Remember the heady days of 1981? You may not, of course. Formed as a break-away from the Labour party at a time when Labour was being infiltrated by the hard left of Militant, and when the party itself was led by an allegedly incompetent, scruffy and equally hard-left leader, Michael Foot, (the comparison with today’s situation is easily made) the SDP burst onto the political scene with unprecedented enthusiasm and success.
Eighty thousand people joined up that year. 28 Labour MP’s defected. By the end of the year a Gallup poll had an alliance of the SDP and the Liberal Party running at over 50% support among voters. “Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government” the Liberal leader, David Steel, told his party conference.
But it was not to be. Two years after the SDP was founded, in 1983, the SDP/Liberal alliance contested its first general election. It won 25% of the vote and gained just 23 seats, only 6 of which were SDP. Something similar happened in the 1987 election, and a year later most of the SDP decided to merge with the Liberals creating the Liberal Democrats. A few under David Owen resisted the merger, but less than a decade after the SDP was formed, its leadership threw in the towel.
William Clouston sips his tea and explains to me how, then, the SDP is still alive. There were those who kept the faith at local level, he explains, small groups and a handful of local councillors in places like Glasgow, Port Talbot and East Yorkshire. But most people forgot about them.
Then last November, something curious happened. Signs of life began to re-appear. The UKIP MEP Patrick O’Flynn quit his party because of its links with Tommy Robinson and joined the SDP. In the same month, the SDP published a New Declaration, written mostly by Cloulston. It is a communitarian, pro-Brexit, social democratic manifesto very much in the style of Maurice Glassman’s Blue Labour – a political manifesto aimed at David Goodhart’s ‘Somewheres’. And about as far away from the liberal ‘Anywheres’ as it is possible to imagine.
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