SDP strikes blow for disenfranchised majority
Wayne Dixon’s victory in a difficult area to crack is surely a major breakthrough for the SDP. It is also a victory for the politically disenfranchised majority of this country.
AS mainstream media pundits argue about what the local elections of May 5th mean for the failed Labour-Tory duopoly and their discredited leaders, a minor political earthquake in Leeds has gone largely unreported. In the city’s Middleton Park ward, Wayne Dixon of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) won a landslide victory – with a stonking majority of some 40 per cent in a high turnout – to become the first non-Labour Party councillor for the ward in decades.
The SDP made huge waves in the 1980s. Founded in 1981 by breakaway Labour Party heavyweights David Owen, Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers, it looked like the SDP could even become the next government (at one point, it was polling over 50 per cent) before a combination of the Falklands War and the First Past the Post system left it with only a small number of parliamentary seats. Eventually, the majority of the SDP merged with the Liberal Party to form the Liberal Democrats.
Although the Owenite wing of the party soldiered on under the SDP banner, it slowly drifted into political irrelevance until, in October 2018, it relaunched on a platform that was more socially conservative than the Conservative Party and more focussed on communitarian policies and creating working class jobs than the Labour Party.
Mr Dixon’s victory in an extremely difficult area to crack – the Inner Keep of Labour’s Red Wall – is surely a major breakthrough for the SDP. It is also, though, a victory for the politically disenfranchised majority of this country, tired of the social and economic liberalism of the Labour-Tory duopoly and uninspired by the rewarmed Thatcherism offered by the other insurgent parties. It is notable that the SDP was also picking up votes elsewhere in Leeds and the rest of Yorkshire.
William Clouston, the leader of the SDP, said that the win “simply confirms what we are hearing on the doorstep”. Most of the country knows that a party which is patriotic, believes in the nation state, holds traditional values dear, and has policies (rather than just talk) to control migration, while simultaneously committing to properly funded, efficient public services, solving the housing crisis and breaking our economy out of the Third World low-wage/low-productivity trap would be onto a winner.
But it’s nice to have the confirmation.