Lessons from the SDP

As the GOP stares into the abyss, driven there by the Frankenstein monster it has created after 20 years of appealing to peoples' baser instincts, some have called for the setting up of another party, one that embodies "conservative principles" without the overt racism and infantile attacks, one that remains aligned with, and beholden to, the special interests that have sustained it for so long. History, is never a perfect predictor of the future, but the fate of the SDP in the in the late 70s and early 80s provides a cautionary tale.

The two main political parties in Britain at the turn of the 20th century were the Tories and the Liberals. With the rise of the more left-of-centre Labor party in 1900, the Liberals won their last election in 1922, shrinking to a small centrist third party by the mid 20th century.

After Labor's defeat to Margaret Thatcher in the 1979 election, four senior members of the Labor shadow cabinet broke away to form a new fourth party, the Social Democratic Party, which was intended to be to the right of an increasingly left-leaning Labor, but slightly to the left of the Liberals. The SDP effectively split the independent vote and struggled to gain any traction in the general elections of 1983 and 1987, and in 1988 merged with the Liberal Party to create the Liberal Democrats.

With Labor's fairly dramatic shift to the centre under Tony Blair's leadership, which brought Labor to power in 1997, the LibDems found themselves hung out to dry on the left of the political spectrum. A deal with the minority Tories in 2010 gave the LibDems access to the levers of power for the first time in almost a century but undermined their support from those in the SDP who felt that they were the last of the left of centre political parties.

The lesson, if there is one, is that breaking away from a well established political party is a risky decision and likely will end in failure. What it would leave in its wake is hard to predict, but it could amount to the "political revolution" others have predicted.