Social Democratic Party
Social Democratic Party (SDP) was a political party of the United Kingdom that existed nationwide between 1981 and 1988. It was founded by four senior members of the right-wing of the Labour Party, dubbed the "Gang of Four": Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams. [1] At the time of the SDP's creation, Owen and Rodgers were sitting Labour Members of Parliament (MPs); Jenkins had left Parliament in 1977 to serve as President of the European Commission, while Williams had lost her seat in the 1979 general election. The four left the Labour Party in the belief that it had become too left-wing, and had been infiltrated at constituency level by Trotskyist factions whose views and behaviour were at odds with the parliamentary party and the Labour-voting electorate.
For the 1983 [2] and 1987 [3] General Elections, the SDP joined the Liberal Party in the SDP-Liberal Alliance. The party merged with theLiberal Party in 1988 to form the Social and Liberal Democrats (SLD), now known as the Liberal Democrats [4], although a minority left to form a new SDP.
Prominent members
Tom Easton writes:
- Other SDP activists receiving early invitations to join the Successor Project were Sue Slipman, the former Communist president of the National Union of Students; Penny Cooper, an old Communist party and NUS colleague of Slipman's who, like her, was a founder member of the SDP; Becky Bryan, a defence analyst and later BBC reporter who was 1983 Alliance candidate for East Hampshire, and Rabbi Julia Neuburger, a member of the government-backed multilateralist Council for Arms Control in the early Eighties and a prominent member of the SDP national committee.[5]
