1980s SDP v 2020s Reform

Will Reform rise and fall like the SDP or is it here to stay?

Reform isn’t just a new, right-of-centre version of the SDP. Here’s six reasons why.

For those still grappling with (and typically abhorring) the meteoric rise of Reform, it’s been a common refrain to argue that we merely are witnessing a modern version of the SDP.

The story goes like this. A new electoral force emerges – seemingly from nowhere – and captures the imagination of the public for a while. However, it’s really just a castle built on sand. It only has very temporary, fair-weather friends. As sure as eggs is eggs, the two main parties of the last one hundred years will pull themselves together. Just as certainly, Reform UK will tear itself apart. Normality will return. The adults will get themselves back into the room. The next election will be, when all is said and done, just like every other election of our lifetimes – a choice between the Conservatives and Labour.

The supposed logic is that if Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and David Owen couldn’t “break the mould” of British politics in the 1980s, there’s even less reason to believe that Nigel Farage can do so now. Jenkins, Williams, Owen and the couple of dozen MPs who swelled their ranks on the SDP benches looked (if you squinted a bit) like a government in waiting. Farage is an ex-metal trader, a raconteur and a talk show host. His immediate allies are wide boys, charlatans and rogues. A rabble of the discontented, the dispossessed and the discombobulated. Not serious candidates for high office.

I think these arguments and caricatures are wrong. Here’s six reasons why Reform is a very different phenomenon to the SDP and why it has a measurably better chance of breaking the two-party duopoly than the SDP had forty years ago.

1. Reform is a mass membership political party – the SDP never was.

When the SDP was launched in a blaze of publicity in 1981, it was the first British political party you could join by using a credit card. This was seen as amazingly cutting edge at the time. The equivalent today is probably paying your membership dues in Bitcoin. However, SDP membership never surpassed 65,000.

If their aim was to replace the Labour Party (and it was) they were seriously outgunned. Labour had around 6 members for every one the SDP claimed.

If you believe the Reform online tracker (and I do), Reform’s membership is now just over a quarter of a million. This matters not just in absolute terms (more people to leaflet, door knock, sell raffle tickets etc) but in comparative terms too. If Reform’s ambition is to consign the Conservatives to the history books (and it is), they have about twice as many members as the Tories.

In any serious “replacement” strategy, the SDP never had an infrastructure remotely close to that of the incumbent party, Labour, that they wished to dislodge. In contrast, the Reform membership is now twice that of the Conservatives.

Reform isn’t far off being the biggest party – in membership terms – in the UK. They are perhaps a few tens of thousands behind Labour but if Reform membership continues to tick up and Labour support continues to dip, that could change before long.

The Social Democrats never got remotely close to this level of paid-up support. Reform may still be in the start-up phase of constructing its grassroots infrastructure, but it has enormously more people to play with than the SDP could ever have dreamt of.

2. The SDP was never much of a force in local government – Reform already is.

This is, of course, connected to the first point. A thriving, sizable local grassroots network is likely to yield impressive returns in council elections. This is just what we saw from Reform in May.

Reform didn’t just gain seats. It increased its number of council seats sixfold. Overnight. It took full control of ten councils. Reform’s projected national vote share that day was 30% (in a highly fragmented multi-party system). This is not just an impressive tally in and of itself but was a full ten points clear of Labour and twice the vote share of the Conservatives, placing Reform in a very clear first place.

Even when they hooked up with well-oiled local Liberal campaigning machines, the SDP never achieved anything remotely on this scale. Take a look back at the 1982 local elections – held at a fairly high-water mark for the SDP.

Sure, the Alliance had a good night. They basically built on what was already a solid Liberal base in local government, gaining nearly four hundred seats. They also took 27% of the total vote (although that was an easier feat back then when we had fewer other parties, like the Greens, putting in any serious local effort). However, they still came third. Two points behind Michael Foot’s Labour Party and fully 13% behind Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives. Never did the SDP-Liberal Alliance come out top on local election night. Reform did so at its first serious attempt. By a mile.

Reform’s mayoral victories in Lincolnshire and Hull and East Yorkshire (alongside very narrow misses in Doncaster and North Tyneside) are merely some huge additional dollops of cream on top of an already enormous cake.

3. The explosion in SDP support was a bubble, Reform’s looks like a trajectory

The enormous excitement around the SDP and then the Alliance flared up in the opinion polls for a few months at the end of 1981. Following the SDP’s launch in March of that year, the Alliance ticked up into the high twenties and then just into the thirties (in, broadly speaking, a three-way split with the Tories and Labour). They went supernova in December 1981, with one poll even putting them at over 50% of the vote.

But when the Falklands war gets underway, support nosedives. By the Spring of 1982, the Alliance is typically back in the high teens or low twenties.

Compare this to Reform’s performance since the election. Having got 14% of the vote in July 2024, the party successfully builds on this support by a few points – nudging towards 20%, and occasionally surpassing that figure, by the end of the year.

In the first three months of 2025, Reform edges up into the mid-20s, usually in a near statistical tie with Labour and the Tories. As spring becomes summer and then autumn, Reform gets into the high twenties or low thirties – consistently leading the polls for a period of what now amounts to months.

Essentially, the SDP rocket zoomed into space and crashed back to Earth in around six to nine months. In contrast, Reform has made steady, consistent, incremental progress – basically doubling its vote share over fully 15 months.

The key thing here is that the data shows there is something that looks sustainable about Reform support. The SDP rise was essentially a more spectacular (and slightly longer) version of “Cleggmania” in the 2015* election or even just a grander version of the frisson around The Independence Group/Change UK when it launched in February 2019 (breaking into double figures in a few polls before rapidly fizzling away into nothingness).

If the SDP was the hare, Reform is the tortoise.

4. Reform wants to smash the status quo – the SDP wanted to preserve it

Political parties of all stripes claim to want to change and modernise the country. Rarely does a party run under the slogan, “Stop the world, we want to get off.”

However, if you dig a bit below the surface you can distinguish between parties who want to broadly retain the prevailing system and those who want to radically alter or even dismantle it.

The SDP was born out of opposition to the dramatic leftward shift in the Labour Party. Unilateral nuclear disarmament, opposition to the Common Market, support for widespread nationalisation, expanding trade union power within the party (Labour leadership elections would now be based on an electoral college with unions having a larger chunk of the vote than the parliamentary party) and a looming threat of deselection for moderate candidates pushed a block of centrists to decide a new party was for the best.

At the same time, the Conservatives were pursuing a radical, free market agenda under Thatcher. The cosy post-war consensus, sometimes labelled Butskellism, had been blown apart. If you wanted a reversion to middle-of-the-road politics, the SDP was for you. If you favoured a mixed economy (some free market reform, but not too much), nuclear weapons (but not too many), a close institutional relationship with the EEC (but not necessarily a United States of Europe) and if you were worried Labour had gone too far to the lunatic left and the Tories to the brutal right, then the Social Democrats could be your respectable political home.

In retrospect, the SDP marked the last gasp of the welfarist cross-party consensus which spanned the 1950s until the mid-1970s. It was, in reality, a sort of dead cat bounce. The SDP was, therefore, highly vulnerable to two possible shifts in political behaviour. Either Labour would move back to the centre-ground or a new and different consensus would emerge. In the event, both happened. Thatcherite reforms became embedded and Kinnock defeated the party’s militant wing, eventually paving the way for New Labour.

Reform is a very different beast. It is not an extremist party in any way (despite its critics being determined to paint it as such) but it does take a decisive position on the major issues of the day rather than typically “splitting the difference”. Carbon Net Zero is bonkers. Immigration is out of control. Many international institutions are not to be trusted and we must extricate ourselves from a good number of them (certainly the ECHR). Wokery is essentially an absurd mind virus and needs to be destroyed. Freedom of speech is in mortal danger. Women cannot have penises.

You might love the Reform platform. You might be horrified by it. But it’s almost impossible to believe that you are wholly indifferent to it.

A Reform victory at a general election would shatter the present consensus and fundamentally alter the UK’s governmental infrastructure. An SDP victory would have meant piloting a middle position somewhere between that of Harold Wilson and Ted Heath while tinkering with a few bits of the constitution (most notably, the electoral system).

But why would an anti-establishment party like Reform be likely to be more durable than an establishment party like the SDP?

The fact is the SDP was fatally exposed if either major party reverted to type. As Labour drifted back to the centre, the Social Democrats withered.

Some Conservatives, such as Robert Jenrick, have said it is their mission to put Reform out of business. But this would require the Conservatives to adopt a radical approach on a range of areas, not a middling, moderate one and not one that the Tories usually embrace.

Reform occupies a space in the political landscape that is alien territory for either Labour or the Tories. That doesn’t make Reform impregnable but it does make them much more secure than the Social Democrats.

5. The SDP had no major dependable base of support. Reform does.

The SDP caused almost no one major offence. It was widely liked. But it was not enormously loved. In a preferential voting system, it is easy to imagine that almost everyone would have picked the Social Democrats as their second-choice party.

However, if they’d organised a demonstration throughout the streets of London, the chant would have been, “What do we want? Moderation! When do we want it? As circumstances permit!” Hardly the sort of thing to get the pulse racing.

The type of person who would be active in the SDP was brilliantly encapsulated in Mark Lawson’s polemical piece “The Nice Man Cometh” in which the main character is a hen-pecked chap called Graham.

Very quickly after its launch, the SDP became little more than a means of lending enhanced credibility to the Liberals. Members of the new party might not have seen it that way – and within a decade the party would split (and ultimately collapse) over the issue of the appropriate relationship with the Liberals. Nevertheless, despite being technically separate parties, the SDP and the Liberals swiftly moved to having joint candidates almost everywhere, effectively a new and united party name (the Alliance) and a joint manifesto for elections.

The initial thinking might have been that the Liberals would challenge in Tory seats in the leafy south and in the Celtic fringe whilst the SDP brand would be more powerful in the cities and areas dominated by Labour. But in practice, the two brands were essentially indistinguishable. The SDP won six seats at the 1983 General Election but would have won zero had it not been for the specific candidates in each of those seats. They were either big personalities (Roy Jenkins, Charles Kennedy) or had built up a reputation as brilliant constituency MPs in the Labour Party (John Cartwright, Robert Maclennan and Ian Wrigglesworth) or both (David Owen).

There was nowhere in the country where the electorate would vote for a donkey if you put an SDP rosette on it. And if there were pockets of strong Alliance support, it made almost zero difference if the branding was SDP rather than Liberal. Essentially by 1982, the SDP-Liberal Alliance was really just the “Liberal Party Plus”.

For sure, Reform only won five seats in 2024. So, it is somewhat absurd to talk in terms of “safe” Reform seats. Nevertheless, even if Reform slipped from its present level of support to that enjoyed by the Alliance in the elections of 1980s (23-25%), seats would tumble into its column almost irrespective of the merits of the local candidate.

Left behind, broadly working-class areas of Britain which voted Brexit in 2016 are Reform’s base. Over half of those who voted Leave are pledging to vote for Reform. That is a huge and identifiable block to build on. People who had traditionally supported Labour, voted Leave in the referendum and then switched to Boris in 2019 are very likely to be Reform voters today.

Of course, with Reform regularly punching through the 30% mark in the polls, it is scoring remarkable successes in areas that would not be considered part of its heartland. Just look at local council by-election results each Thursday. But the key point is that Reform has a heartland, whereas the SDP never did.

6. Nigel Farage is marmite and marmite endures

A good number of pundits think that a better guide to future elections is to look at favourability ratings for party leaders rather than current party voting intentions. The two are interlinked, of course. If a leader is monumentally unpopular, their party is unlikely to be doing well in the polls. Nevertheless, if you want to harvest a good chunk of votes you need a leader who is liked and admired by a decent chunk of the electorate.

I would go one step further then simply looking at leadership ratings. I think you also have to factor in intensity. Having 40% of the electorate who find you mildly attractive in a quaint sort of way while 60% have no opinion of you whatsoever would yield a “+40” approval rating. That’s the sort of number that party leaders would supposedly give their right arm for.

But they’d be wrong to. You are better to have 25% or 30% of the electorate who would crawl over broken glass for you than have 35% or 40% who think you are “quite nice”.

You can also weather much higher negative ratings if your own supporters are devout.

The electorate might, on balance, find Ed Davey rather endearing. But those who think his leaping around on waterslides and sailboards make him a charming – if slightly eccentric – chap are a long way from being nailed on to vote LibDem.

David Owen, as SDP leader, as well as David Steel of the Liberals faced a similar problem (although neither of them would be seen dead attempting to gain publicity by reenacting scenes from the children’s television show, Tiswas).

Owen, in particular, maintained hugely high personal approval ratings even when his continuity SDP had split from the Liberal Democrats, was down to 3 MPs and scoring under 5% in the national polls. Precious little good it did him.

Paddy Ashdown also became a widely (but not deeply) liked politician but could never get his party above 20% of the vote.

Nigel Farage is different. Those who like him really like him. By and large they don’t think he’s merely an intriguing chap who adds to the gaiety of nations. They want him – often desperately want him - to become Prime Minister.

For sure, vast swathes of people are determined to stop Farage becoming Prime Minister (and a smaller number of very powerful people fit into this category too). But many millions are determined to see him walk in to No 10. That doesn’t mean he will, but it makes him as enduring as marmite.

Marmite has been around, largely unaltered, since 1902. It shows no signs of going away. Farage is marmite and so likely to endure. The SDP was more like a food brand from forty years ago that was consumed without much complaint but is now not much missed. Angel Delight perhaps.

For all of these six reasons, the Reform phenomenon is wildly different to that of the SDP. It’s not just that they are different parties from top to bottom ideologically, it’s that they are of entirely different forms.

Politics is volatile. It is susceptible to unpredictable one-off events not merely to discernible trends.

A decent lead in the opinion polls some years away from a general election is absolutely no guarantee of victory. Between now and 2029, the only thing we can be sure of is that much will change in ways we can’t readily forecast.

However, whatever the ebbs and flows between now and then, there are many good reasons to believe that Reform has a far better chance than the SDP of being both a permanent and powerful fixture in the British party system. It is now difficult to see how a right-of-centre government could be constructed without Reform being a meaningful part of such an administration – quite possibly the totality of it.

So, the next time you see a pundit suggest that Reform will likely wither away because we have seen all this sort of stuff before, you should reach for the salt cellar.

The fact of the matter is that Reform and the SDP aren’t merely different kettles of fish. They are completely different aquariums.

(* Thanks to Jonathan Isaby for correcting me. Cleggmania was at the 2010 election, not the 2015 election. How time flies when you’re having fun!)