SDP /Liberal merger in 1987, SDP members vote against

[markf]

The SDP  membership in 1987 vote against merging with the Liberals

[Izzyeviel]

Bye bye SDP. Maybe they could have lingered on and absorbed the Corbynites in the Blair years?

[markf]

I was a member 1981-87, I would have voted against then,but ive always voted Libdem since in any election

[Deleted]

I suppose the question is, would the Liberal-SDP Alliance have simply carried on as before, or would there would have been a reason for the two parties to fall out and stand against each other. The former would have been more sensible from their point of view.

[No Offence Alan]

I think Roy Jenkins would have joined the Liberals.

[Devil Wincarnate]

May 17, 2017 22:39:45 GMT No Offence Alan said:

I think Roy Jenkins would have joined the Liberals.

Didn't he consider such a move before founding the SDP?

[The Bishop]

Yes, and he would certainly have done so had the rest of the Gang of Four had cold feet at the eleventh hour.

IIRC his Labour party membership had been "allowed to lapse" a few years earlier.

[Crimson King]

I have seen it written that he wanted to join the Liberals but was persuaded by (I think) David Steel , that leading a breakaway would be more effective

[mrhell]

I suspect Charles Kennedy would have also joined the Liberals given he voted for the merger. Probably Maclennan would have joined as well. That would only leave Barnes, Cartwright and Owen who were part of the continuity SDP anyway,

[Merseymike]

The problem was that the SDP simply didn't 'break the mould', and so many of those they would have hoped to recruit stayed in the main two parties. So if they had not voted for merger, it would have been difficult to see where they should go, as by voting against they would have indicated they weren't Liberals, but what exactly were they?
Indeed, the failure of the continuity SDP suggests no-one really knew

[carlton43]

The Owenites might have pulled it off and established a party attractive to wings of the Conservatives, Labour and Liberals. The problem was being a bit too broad church for its own good in those early years. Shirley must have been an absolute menace as a high profile popular centre-point with untidy baggy ideas to suit her untidy baggy self. And Woy being a bit to airy-fairy and even at times other worldly. Owen was a tougher, tauter street politician with a hard even vicious core. I liked him a lot. If it had been his creature rather like the Farage creature, I think he could have really broken the mould by causing major damage to both the majors and making the Liberals seem even more useless and irrelevant than they were. Massive and unfortunate lost opportunity.

[yellowperil]

Again, I declare an interest as a member of the SDP voting for merger and remember well the awful Portsmouth conference where it all came to pieces with blood everywhere, metaphorically speaking I hasten to add. Frankly, there was no chance of the bulk of the membership voting to continue alone, and had they done so I cannot believe for a moment the continuing and separate SDP would have done any better than the David Owen admiration society that remained. One question which might be asked is what  might have happened to the pro-Tory faction -I have in mind primarily Messrs Finkelstein and Nye, later prominent within the Hague brand of Toryism? (and I say that with some trepidation as the person who helped recruit the schoolboy Rick Nye to the SDP )

[timrollpickering]

ISTR a strong assertion that a lot of members of the Alliance post 1983 tended to have mentally joined "the Alliance" and wound up in whichever party had the local nomination. So they were unlikely to have a strong attachment to social democracy as opposed to liberalism and would probably have approached the merger ballot as more a technical exercise in tidying up the party than a philosophical debate.

But if the SDP did reject merger then the two parties would almost certainly have moved to assert their separate identities, perhaps with the Alliance breaking down amidst local parties defying the pacts and trying to crush each other.

[pragmaticidealist]

Having just finished a book on Liberal leaders, it would seem that the SDP was divided along three lines. The first was that represented by Roy Jenkins, which sought to create a unified non-socialist centre-left force against Conservatism. The second was represented by Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers, and it saw the SDP as more or less the rightward flank of the Labour Party, the party that (in the minds of those who advocated this approach) Labour was prior to the 1970s. The third was that of a party revolving around David Owen, one that had little time for the Liberals beyond the electoral alliance.

The second of those was the first to fail, i.e. when the SDP won only a handful of seats in 1983 (and, symbolically, both Williams and Rodgers lost their seats). The merger and the subsequent relative closeness of the Lib Dems and New Labour during the 1990s meant a victory for the first of the three approaches, although it probably wasn't quite what Jenkins had hoped for.

Had the merger been rejected, then the Owen approach would have won out, but the consequences probably wouldn't have been greatly different.

[J.G.Harston]

Reading the background I am reminded that the SDP had a national conference in Sheffield to agree the merger. Why Sheffield? I don't remember it as a hotbed of SDPism, rather it was a Liberal Party stronghold.

I wish I'd been around to see it, but 1987 was when I went to university.

[timrollpickering]

Sept 3, 2018 18:08:23 GMT J.G.Harston said:

Reading the background I am reminded that the SDP had a national conference in Sheffield to agree the merger. Why Sheffield? I don't remember it as a hotbed of SDPism, rather it was a Liberal Party stronghold.

Easy public transport?

[Arthur Figgis]

Decent beer?

[right]

May 25, 2017 8:08:38 GMT yellowperil said:

Again, I declare an interest as a member of the SDP voting for merger and remember well the awful Portsmouth conference where it all came to pieces with blood everywhere, metaphorically speaking I hasten to add. Frankly, there was no chance of the bulk of the membership voting to continue alone, and had they done so I cannot believe for a moment the continuing and separate SDP would have done any better than the David Owen admiration society that remained. One question which might be asked is what  might have happened to the pro-Tory faction -I have in mind primarily Messrs Finkelstein and Nye, later prominent within the Hague brand of Toryism? (and I say that with some trepidation as the person who helped recruit the schoolboy Rick Nye to the SDP )

Hague may also owe his own political life to the merger.  If there had not been a merger there would have been a single Alliance candidate at the Richmond belection (no matter how much the parties disliked one another) with a chance of gaining traction and Richmond may not have been the last successful by-election defence by the 1979 to 1997 Conservatives.