The SDP failed to break the mould of British politics. Reform has a better chance

Telegraph

02-05-2025

In living memory, the only comparison with the big political effect of Reform UK is the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which was born in 1981 as a breakaway from Labour.
In that year, the then-famous Shirley Williams won a smashing by-election for the SDP at Crosby, a mere half an hour's drive from Runcorn, scene of today's Reform triumph. Although the SDP had a sort of afterlife, it died as a political force in 1988, merging with the Liberals.
Arguably, it failed even earlier: at the 1983 general election, it severely reduced the Labour vote but did not prevent a Conservative landslide for Margaret Thatcher. Both the main parties survived this onslaught of fanatical moderation. The SDP did not, in its own phrase, 'break the mould'.
Reform, though under different names, has had influence for far longer. Even in the 20th century, Nigel Farage began to be the key figure. In 2006, he became Ukip leader for the first time. In 2016, the threat which his party posed to the unity and electoral success of the Conservatives caused David Cameron, without nearly enough time spent in reconnaissance, to rush into – and lose – the momentous referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union.
The rise of Boris Johnson, and the electoral success of Boris's 'Get Brexit done ' general election of 2019, eclipsed what had now become the Brexit Party. Until galvanised by Rishi Sunak's sneaky snap election gamble in July 2024, Mr Farage appeared to have resigned himself to becoming a full-time media personality.
But then, seizing the moment, as he does so well, he swept back. His party (latest name, Reform UK) won five seats including his, and, more significantly, more than four million votes, making it the third-largest party in Britain.
And now this. Reform has seized (just) one of Labour's safest seats and some of the Tories' safest councils. Mr Farage has rightly intuited that, while it took the Conservatives 14 years to get themselves into a thorough mess, landslide Labour managed it in about 14 weeks. Today, the Tories suffered further, expected humiliation; Labour suffered new, perhaps unexpected, humiliation.
So the Farage-Reform effect is durable. Why?
Here again the comparison with the SDP may help. In its very conception, it was an elite movement. Its 'Gang of Four' that got it going consisted entirely of Labour former Cabinet ministers, three of whom – Roy Jenkins, Mrs Williams and David Owen – were household names. It emerged less from popular discontents than from the quarrels at the top of the Labour Party.
It also had tremendous backing from London-based media. We at this newspaper had the greatest fun at its expense but, for grand organisations like the BBC and the Financial Times, the SDP fulfilled their almost erotic fantasy of a 'compassionate' centrist pro-European party that also wouldn't tax important people like them to death.
The SDP caused less excitement down the pub (I should explain, for younger readers, that a 'pub' was a local bar where people, mostly men, mostly far from rich, could drink, smoke, laugh and complain. It was the mainstay of almost every community.) When the SDP died, it was not widely mourned, though it did help strengthen the Liberals. Its history was a useful cautionary tale to a young man called Tony Blair. He worked out how to bring quite similar policies to Labour without splitting the party.
Reform, by contrast, had no encouragement whatever from the mighty. I remember being ticked off by Douglas Hurd, who was then the foreign secretary, for the simple act of publishing, in the Sunday Telegraph in 1995 or so, a comment piece by the then leader of Ukip. If Ukip appeared on the BBC at all, it was only to be roasted for some obscure council candidate who had been caught making off-colour remarks about a sacred subject, such as immigration or LGBT rights.
The Farage vehicle, under its various names, mostly had to make its own way in the world. It therefore has an air of authenticity about it. It is the political equivalent of the self-made man – a bit cocky, perhaps, a bit insensitive sometimes, but a life force, something to be reckoned with.
The two main parties do not feel like that at all, even though Kemi Badenoch's rise as the first African to become a British party leader is quite a story.
Both sense they have not got anything much right for a long time. The Labour Party lost authority in Iraq and when the economic good times came to an end during the financial crisis of 2008-9. The Conservatives lost it over Covid and the accompanying disarray.
Both lost it over Brexit, not so much, perhaps, because they supported Remain (a respectable, though mistaken, cause), as because they managed to lose. Over net zero, both have deployed moralism to override legitimate fears of cost and impracticality, so both are no longer believed. Over immigration, both advocate control but produce chaos.
Our prosperity, security and liberty all feel shakier than they did a quarter of a century ago.
And since the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, lashed her economic policy to figures about government borrowing which are largely beyond her power to hit, the whole Starmer government is in a state of frantic inaction.
I did not have a vote in Thursday's local elections (my county's choice is postponed by a year because of this funny business with mayors), nor am I a citizen of Runcorn or Helsby. But if I had been able to vote, I can well imagine choosing Reform, not because I would have had any particular belief that the party will get things right, but because I could find no other appropriate gesture to indicate that things are wrong.
It might seem to follow from what I have said above that I am arguing that Reform should take over from the Tories or even from Labour (quite a lot of its policies are becoming socialist). Actually, I am not.
Our two-party system has some disadvantages, but it has at least two virtues. The first is that it prevents the main parties from being captured by one sect. They must be informal coalitions to win. This is good training for future ministers.
The second is that when they win with a good working majority, they have the possibility of bringing about real change. That was true for Attlee in 1945, Mrs Thatcher in 1979 and Blair in 1997.
The same ought to be true for Sir Keir Starmer, with Labour's overall majority at the last election – 174, now reduced following Runcorn and other embarrassments, to 156 – still unassailable. But this time, very unusually, the disproportion between votes cast (33.7 per cent for Labour) and seats won is so great as to be unsettling. Labour is the uncomfortable beneficiary of an arithmetical freak: only 20 per cent of those entitled to vote supported it last July.
The chances must be that, next time, the seats will be more proportionate to the votes for the main parties. If so, normal rules will apply once more and Reform will find it hard to break through. The Tories will have used their time to rethink and, just possibly, Labour will have done the right things, all else having failed.
We still cannot possibly say that Reform is fit to govern. I must admit that I doubt it. But what can now be said is that Reform has shifted the burden of proof: the two main parties always argue for their competence. On what evidence?