Forgotten party is a home for frustrated voters

Yes, the SDP still exists and it holds a new appeal for those weary of the two-party status quo

Interviews with John Cleese are rarely predictable and his appearance on Today on BBC Radio 4 yesterday morning was no exception. Alongside promoting his forthcoming GB News show, Cleese let slip that he had spent the weekend with SDP members at their annual conference in Manchester. Back in the 1980s, Cleese recorded party political broadcasts for the SDP/Liberal Alliance. So perhaps listeners were less shocked by his views than they were to discover that the Social Democratic Party is still going strong after all these years.

I am pleased to say that breakfast coffee remained unspluttered in my house. I had also been at the SDP conference and, as a member, was proud to have spoken alongside not just Cleese but the party leader William Clouston, Rod Liddle of The Sunday Times, Leeds city councillor Wayne Dixon and many others.

People assume the SDP fizzled out after its alliance and eventual merger with the Liberal Party and the creation of the Liberal Democrats. But it didn’t. David Owen and a handful of activists refused to join the newly formed party and, instead, resuscitated the SDP brand in its pre-alliance form. Having been on life support for the best part of three decades, the SDP has undergone a recent revival. Today, the differences between the SDP and the Liberal Democrats could not be more stark. The Lib Dems, always a pro-EU party, pledged to revoke Brexit if they won a majority in the 2019 general election. The SDP, by contrast, stood squarely behind the referendum mandate. Its New Declaration argues that being a democrat means respecting the demands of voters. And whereas senior Lib Dem MPs struggle to define what it means to be a woman, the SDP is clear that biological sex is real and people should not be allowed to change their legal sex by self-identification alone.

Photo by Tom Fenn/SDP.