The failure of the SDP shows how hard it is to create a centre-left party with the right identity to appeal to voters
In the summer of 2016, with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership highly unpopular with Labour MPs but nevertheless secure, there was much talk of a new centre party to be formed before the next election. I thought history shed some light on the prospects of such a split.
On my first day in my first job I had to ask my new boss if it would be all right if I left early. I explained that I was on the national executive of the Social Democratic Party, and that I held what was effectively the casting vote in a major political row.
This excruciating conversation might have been made mildly easier if the ‘major political row’ had been comprehensible to any outsider. Instead it concerned some procedural rules governing a ballot on whether the SDP should merge with the Liberal Party.
Yet almost thirty years later it occurs to me that what we were rowing about is once again relevant. Not the details, of course, but the broad question of party splits and the relationship between liberals and social democrats.
Most of the coverage about the Labour Party’s dire position concerns whether the ‘moderates’ will or should split from the ‘Corbynistas’ if Corbyn retains the leadership. My own experience suggests it is all a bit more complicated than that.
When some years ago David Owen, one of the SDP’s founders, sent me an early draft of his memoirs, I understood for the first time that he had seen the SDP as essentially doomed – certainly in deep trouble – before I even joined it at the beginning of 1982. What had doomed it, in his view, was the decision to form a tight alliance with the Liberal Party.
Owen’s conception of the SDP, which was formed in 1981, is that it would be a tough-minded, hawkish party of the left. It would appeal to an aspirational working class, particularly in the north, who had tired of bureaucratic socialism and saw the point of Margaret Thatcher, but were not Tories.
When the future Labour Foreign Secretary was a student working on a building site he had been struck by the reaction of his fellow workers to the Suez Crisis. It had been instinctively nationalist, uninterested in political protocol, and robust. It was these people he wanted the SDP to appeal to.
Roy Jenkins, former Labour chancellor but also biographer of the Liberal prime minister H. H. Asquith, wanted a centre party that reflected his own liberal instinct. This would be a southern party of the middle class, disdainful of Thatcher, fastidious rather than bulldog-like on international issues, avowedly centrist.
Everything about this Jenkins view – the electoral relationship with the Liberals in particular, but also the claret-drinking image – drove Owen crazy. But for all that he later did to shape the party, Owen was right that by 1982 Jenkins had won the battle. The SDP would be a liberal party. It lost almost all its northern and working-class seats, was not able to compete in the south because the Liberal Party took all the best constituencies, and ended up being swallowed up by its partner.
Owen and Jenkins were rowing over whether liberalism and being a Labour moderate or even a centrist were the same thing. Jenkins felt that practically and philosophically they were. Owen felt that practically and philosophically they were not.
In his history of the Labour Party, Speak for Britain!, Martin Pugh argues convincingly that liberalism has always been only one strand of Labour, and not its most important one. From its earliest days a very large part of the party has been conservative on constitutional questions, culturally sentimental and nostalgic, cautious on issues of individual freedom, opposed to mass immigration, monarchist, nationalist, patriotic and militaristic.
When Jenkins, as home secretary, moved in a liberal direction, many older Labour MPs worried this would alienate their working-class support, particularly among Catholics. Others thought it merely irrelevant. James Callaghan responded to the legalisation of homosexuality with bewilderment. He admitted that he hardly knew what homosexuality was and said he hadn’t come across it.
In 1976 when Harold Wilson retired, it was Callaghan – Eurosceptic and immigration sceptic – who won the leadership, beating Jenkins handily. When supporters of the latter canvassed fellow MPs in the tea room one of those MPs responded: ‘Nah, we are all Labour here.’
All of this is more than history. The Owen critique of the Jenkins position remains a sharp one and directly relevant to Labour moderates. If they decided they could no longer stick Corbyn, what sort of party would they create?
What is the electoral base of a straightforwardly liberal party? Labour voters least likely to be impressed by Corbyn are most likely to be hawkish on defence, tough on immigration and sympathetic to Brexit. There will be middle-class dissidents too, but smaller in number because many of those already vote Conservative and are likely to carry on doing so.
In the absence of a large Conservative defection, a liberal Labour Party would struggle. If a liberal party decided, for instance, to be the party against Brexit and for free movement, how would it hold seats in the north, or indeed outside London?
What then of the prospects of a split that created a more traditional Labour Party? Owen’s experience shows how hard it would be to make that succeed. It would require a very large proportion of Labour MPs to go with it, and to agree to a populist platform that many of them are nervous about. And even then it might struggle to win northern seats where party tradition is strong. One of the problems with traditionalist voters is that they are, well, traditionalist.
Owen argues that resigning to fight by-elections might have helped the SDP, and he has a point. It is difficult, however, to be optimistic about the prospect for independent Labour.
What all this indicates is that the great trick in politics is not to split. It is to unify. The great achievement of Ramsay MacDonald, Jimmy Thomas and Keir Hardie, of the Fabians and the unions, of the intellectuals and the activists, is that they managed to assemble a diverse coalition and keep it together, even when the odds against doing so were very great.
Neil Sedaka was wrong. Breaking up is not very hard to do. It’s easy to disassemble a political alliance. It’s putting one together that is challenging.
Splitting from the Labour Party may end up being necessary. I’d certainly argue that it was in 1981. But it would represent failure. It isn’t obvious what sort of moderate party would emerge. Chuka Umunna’s liberal party? Or John Mann’s traditional one? These are very different propositions, and it isn’t clear how either would succeed.