Divorced, Beheaded, Survived?
SDP 2: Electric Boogaloo
Asked about the revival of his old party, Lord Owen, one of the original founders, told us: “I don’t want to talk about the SDP.” - The Evening Standard.
The SDP was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. Yet in defiance of the national executive, those who held onto the ideals of the party vowed to continue on in a new capacity. This new 'Continuing SDP', literally still called the Social Democratic Party with the same logo as before, was initially led by Jack Holmes. Jack Holmes is particularly monumental for being the candidate who had represented the Owenite SDP in the Bootle by-election that ended it all. This new SDP continued along in a similar vein to its predecessor, contesting parliamentary by-elections such as Neath in 1991, coming fifth with 5.3% of the vote and challenging local elections.
There was very little broad success to be found here, although the party did win representation on Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council from 1999-2017 and on the East Riding of Yorkshire Council where they won 1 seat in 1995 with Raymond Allerston who was joined by his wife Christine from 1999 to 2007 in the same ward. They similarly achieved some success in a few town councils, but there is a clear picture of them being concentrated in a few select wards and being geographically very thin. Little changed in this era from 1990 to 2017 with the party barely clinging on, having a near constant struggle to hold any elected representatives.
There was one interesting moment on the local level when Solihull's first Green councillor defected to the SDP in 2015, citing, and I quote, "No particular reason" for defecting. "I have no problems or concerns with my colleagues and I have been part of the Green Party for the past 20 years." He would go on to state that he felt he could do more in his role by being an independent councillor, that he liked that the SDP opposed EU membership, and that he thought it'd bring competition to the ward. He would go on to lose the seat to the Greens where he gained only 17 votes with a turnout of 2,047 people.
Things began to change, however, in 2018 with the election of William Clouston as leader. A member of both the original SDP and Owenite SDP, he would take the new SDP and reboot it into the new new SDP, taking it in a very different direction that it hadn’t seen before. I had the pleasure of speaking to him directly for By-election Bonanza so will allow that interview to speak for itself. A quick note that this is a cut down transcription of the interview.
Adam: Why did the SDP continue after David Owen dissolved it?
William: We think we still are the SDP, because a party is a voluntary association and a party is its members, not the legal entity itself. The Labour Party and a lot of modern political parties have transformed themselves into limited partnerships effectively or other legal entities but no one says they aren't the same party. We would say that after Owen left in 1990 after Bootle, the party in the regions remained. Remember, it was very difficult to close it down because in places like Bridlington we were the biggest group on the District Council. What are you going to do? Owen's going to say "I'm going to close down so you have to stop being social democrats", well people say "I don't agree with you." And the branch in places like that and in south Wales and other places, the branches stayed open. The regional parties and local parties stayed, the councillors stayed with people meeting each other and campaigning so no one could stop us continuing and continue it we did. The SDP bank account in East Yorkshire we still have, from the 80s.
Adam: Okay interesting, I believe most of the assets that the SDP had transferred to the Social and Liberal Democrats when they merged.
William: That's the point about it. The merger entailed a legal merger but the point that John Cartwright made is that you can't have a ballot [on merging the Liberal and SDP] to tell me which political party to be a member of. That remains. That's true. You can't use a ballot to tell me that I'm not a social democrat or I am or that the SDP doesn't have the right to exist. Here we go 40 years later with the same logo and the same membership, we have members that go all the way to the 80s and as I said bank accounts and other party paraphernalia. It's very hard to kill a party.
Adam: Can you take me through a rough course of the party history up to the New Declaration?
William: Post 1990, when Owen decided to leave the field we had about 12,000 members. 12,000 members is, I would say, the minimum to be a truly national party. When he left that dwindled, I don’t have the numbers in front of me but I think it dwindled to the low thousands pretty rapidly including me. I didn't renew in '91 partly because a lot of people had thought it had gone, it was pre-internet days so a lot of the people who had kept it going were in physical geographies where you have councillor groups and parties. They largely kept it going. I don’t think there was a huge amount of political activity. Pre-New Declaration the party was very much not to the grassroots, and just kept alive. Membership went very low, sub 100. That was broadly the picture. The New Declaration was on the back of that, really rethinking it and we got Patrick O'Flynn to join which was quite nice because we had 1 MEP and the Lib Dems had 1 MEP so we had the same number as they had for a while. A few prominent journalists and other people joined, the membership is back up to the low thousands again and we're going into the right direction.
Adam: That brings me onto my next question, what is the New Declaration and why was it made?
William: It's basically, if you know SDP history, it was founded in '81 after a prominent group of 4 Labour Party members, although Jenkins wasn't a member of the Labour Party at the time, and the SDP was started on the back of the Limehouse Declaration which was basically a critique of the Labour Party and where it was going. That was 40 years ago, but when Peter Johnson resigned as Leader [of the ‘Continuing’ SDP] in late 2017 the National Committee asked me to be interim leader and I agreed and I stepped up and I did it. They had retained the basic principles, you were in favour of PR, a strong and active state but you wanted a strong private sector. The basic ideas were there but they also drifted off and there was a lack of sharpness in terms of what social democracy was. In particular we had become, along with Owen, very EU sceptic. Pro-European but EU sceptic. There were one or two other differences where we had become what you might describe as post-liberal in our philosophical thinking as well. So there were one or two changes that hadn't been reflected in policy and in where we were going so I said the National Committee that if you wanted to reboot the party and you wanted it growing again then you had to be clear about what you want to do, what you mean and to have a firm foundation of ideas. It came from the question of "What would the Limehouse Declaration look like if written now?", but they didn’t really have any clear ideas so I said let's do it and let's do a new declaration. It took a long time, several months because we consulted widely. Some prominent members of the Labour Party helped us, although they wouldn't put their name to it, as well as some prominent journalists, academics and thinkers. It's a new foundational document about what we are. I think we have a clear idea of what we're going than many of the others.
Adam: The ideology is unapologetically socially conservative when the original SDP wasn't, so where does this new ideology stem from? What has changed from the 1980s to cause this?
William: I think the SDP always had a red and blue mix. The concept of red and blue politics, New Labour and Red Tory, represents the combination of ideas. Jenkins and Williams were very much liberal left progressives but I don't think Owen was. He had a traditional outlook on nation state, but leaving that aside I think the obvious answer to the change has been the effects of 30 years of liberalism. What you have, what David Goodhart calls Double Liberalism, social and economic liberalism simultaneously and our contention is that it has overreached on both of them. If you haven't noticed then you haven't seen what has happened to traditional family life or the consequences of that. If you haven't noticed what has happened in the economy then you haven't seen the process of deindustrialisation. We're down [in manufacturing] to 9% of GDP from 33%. Most of the industrial towns have lost their high quality jobs and that was the foundation of the family. The Hayekian, econ liberal attitude means it doesn't matter, as long as you get cheap goods it doesn't matter where it comes from. We disagree with that, it’s an experiment which has tried and it getting to the end game now but the pandemic has shown the folly of it. A lot of this econ liberalism and purist free tradeism is strategically very foolish, you have taken a process of economic disarmament. It's not worked out. If you start noticing that you have to react to it and develop policies which address it, and that means the post-liberal turn. It's means a more domestic focus on economics, a more traditional moral values of how you treat society and I think it was necessary. I think it sits very well. The red and blue thing is really interesting because it hasn't occurred to a lot of people how badly the ideas within the Labour Party or the Tory Party program really don't sit together very well. The best example is probably housing, where both major parties have housing policies which are incoherent and can’t possibly succeed. The Labour Party want to solve the housing crisis but they're very pro high immigration. You can't have both. You can limit immigration a little bit and build some council houses and then you might have some success but you can't have one or the other. The Tories say they want to lower immigration but they’re not serious about it. It's totally laissez faire and in the pockets of the big housing groups. The solution to it is to have a blend of a right-wing policy and a left-wing policy.
Adam: Whenever you campaign, what has been the base of the party, who are the core people, is it even a group you can describe?
William: We are split into regional parties, in some regions we have several hundred members but in the South East that's spread from Oxfordshire to Kent and that's quite a challenge but in a place like Yorkshire where we're probably strongest we've got several hundred members. I think we contested 18 seats in Leeds City Council area last election, one of the seats we came within 300 votes within winning. These are big city seats. Who are the activists? People who agree with us. The social components of the SDP membership is quite varied. We have a blend of very working class communities in the North and published authors and the like in London. It's a nice combination. They're just activists the same as any other party.
Adam: A question about one of your more recent by-election campaigns in Hartlepool, whose idea was the tank?
William: Mine. One of the pitfalls of a by-election is you'll never know who will contest it. We're in a phase of our development where you've got to be resilient to poor results. It's a necessity of a small party to contest elections and to keep in the ring and fight in the ring for a decade, and then access it. Then you have to ask if after a decade of by-election participation "Does the General Public know that the SDP exists to a greater extent than if we hadn't?" and the answer is yes of course it would. Do you have to take poor results? Yes we do. Does it matter? Yes it matters but you have to be philophobia about it. Without a national profile and or a particularly good local candidates you're going to get 100 votes, 200 votes if you're lucky, 300 votes if you're very lucky. Small parties should contest them. Reform, Reclaim, Renew or UKIP, I'm not sure what they’re about. The decision to go for a particular seat is the default even if it difficult. The tank is to try and get cut though. You need to try and do what you can, I don't think it got us a lot of votes but it got us the front page of the Hartlepool Mail and a clip on the BBC and it was also good fun. It probably triggered the right people.
Adam: How do you go about campaigning in somewhere like Batley and Spen?
William: We wanted to try a targeted door knocking and canvassing approach there and we did it but funnily enough it didn't show huge success. On most days we had 2 or 3 people, and on big days we had 7 or 8. We did a bit of everything, street stalls in Batley, we attended the Lawrence Fox "Free Speech Rally" where the candidate gave a speech. There's lot of theory about this. We got pretty badly crushed, although Heritage, David [Kurten]'s party, did even worse but he did really well in Hartlepool. Often we don’t know why, it's quite strange. One of best results was in Newport West where we got close to 1%, and we spent about £4,500 grand but in Peterborough where Patrick stood as the sitting MEP did worse than that and we spent much more. I don't think there's a strong relationship between what you spend and what you get as a small party. In Airdrie & Shotts we had a good local candidate and we got close to 0.7% and the Liberal Democrats only beat us by 69 votes. Neil Manson was relatively well known, he had done football coaching, and he did relatively well. Unless they change the quantum cost of the deposit or change the rules for free distribution of leaflets you're always going to get small parties contesting by-elections. The entry ticket is £500, we tend to go for something a little bit better but you can get 50,000 leaflets for £500. This is the economics, a small party can enter a race and get free distribution for 50,000 homes of your leaflets for £1,000. We would never be able to afford that without the free post. Before the New Declaration most of the political commentariat didn't know us, but now they do. The public doesn't but they're next. The difficulty is taking the result.
Adam: When you lose what do you take from it?
William: You learn to roll with the results. You learn that if your party can engage on a particular local issue or have a local candidates you're going to do better but in a General campaign the candidate virtually make zero difference. You have to take the result on the nose, for a small party it isn't worth spending vast amounts of money, but the lesson I would take is that the public do consider by-elections as a free shot with very little consequences but they take it quite seriously as the winner represents their locality. It's a showpiece of what they're thinking at the time. These pivotal by-elections are using the party as an instrument, so don't believe the Hartlepudlians are suddenly committed laissez faire liberal Tories, they're not, they're disgusted by the Labour Party. What's the worst thing we could do to the Labour Party? Vote Tory.
Adam: That is all the questions from me, this has been very, very helpful, thank you so much.
Looking back upon the Owenite SDP and the current state of the 'Continuing SDP' there is a fascination in how two parties took upon the same logo and yet turned out so differently. The Owenite SDP was a vehicle for David Owen to showcase his discontent with the Liberal-SDP merger but when it failed he abandoned it because he was a national figure who wanted national success. Somehow the 'Continuing SDP' has clung on with dedicated members for two decades despite a lack of general press attention, no real electoral success and being locked in far flung geographic areas. To go from sub one hundred members to the current home for thousands is an interesting tale to explore within British politics. William has shared an interesting part of the story on the transformation of the SDP into its current status as a socially conservative, communitarian party that goes beyond being an interesting footnote, it instead tells the story of a political identity as a result of our changing times, although how reflective this is onto our general politics is heavily questionable. Whether it will ever be successful on a national level is yet to be seen, although I would suggest that their focus on by-elections at the parliamentary level rather than at the local level is likely a source of their stagnant growth. Not to presume myself above whoever runs their campaigns but small parties win on the back of existing support, not suddenly shifting support, and that support could only come from a slowly expanding council base that can take the local and convert it into the national. Certainly sounds like they have the money to try it.
In summary of this two part series, let's look towards Horrible Histories for how to diagnose the trilogy of the SDP. Divorced. Beheaded. Survived. The original SDP, by joining into the Liberals to form our current Liberal Democrats, divorced themselves of a unique political identity and instead emboldened a new form of centrist politics. The Owenite SDP was beheaded by David Owen due to an insufficient membership creating embarrassment at Bootle and not being enough to satisfy their leader's desire for national political fame. The 'Continuing SDP' has survived by growing a membership beyond isolated geographic space, yet is still in a state of limbo. Despite a clear ideology that has been rebooted from the ground up they are still falling behind the Monster Raving Loony Party that killed off its predecessor, suggesting that not much has changed since the 1990s. It is without representation at the local government level. It gets barely any attention from any form of media. The best it could do in May this year was be within 300 votes of a single council seat. There is yet to be rather conclusive evidence that this ideology will be successful, but I doubt it'll stop anytime soon. Ultimately a political party is its people, and for as long as they want to keep it going (with or without success), they'll make sure to avoid the fate of Jane Seymour.
Thank you so much for reading By-election Bonanza, I've been Adam Lawless and I'll see you in 2 weeks for something that technically isn’t a by-election but sort of is so I’m covering it anyways.
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