The new SDP - what to make of it?
The Social Democratic Party's recent conference was impressive, but showed off its faults too.
I have been toying with writing a piece on the new SDP for a while.
I am a member of the party and have just renewed my membership. I know and like many of the principal figures, including the leader William Clouston. There is a risk of appearing to betray people by sharing your thoughts in public – even behind my own paywall.
However I decided that it’s my role as a writer to talk about things I have decent insight into. I also think the party needs people in the public arena talking about it, not just as party loyalists, factional fighters or committed opponents but as critical friends. Organisations need an ecosystem of people paying attention to thrive. This helps to raise their profile and with it their sense of responsibility – that what they are doing matters; that whether they succeed or fail matters.
So – disclaimer/preamble over, what’s going on with the new SDP?
I’m going to talk about it through the lens of the one-day party conference the party held at Church House in London on 6th November, which showed off some of the good and the not-so-good.
In many ways it was an excellent event. I believe around three hundred people were there, many from outside London. The list of speakers was impressive. As Peter Franklin indicated in a piece for Unherd, the activists and others attending showed few obvious signs of madness. The vibe was good and friendly. For a small party with no local councillors let alone MPs, it showed something.
The speeches were a bit of a mixed bag however. The historian David Starkey, who resigned from a Cambridge professorship and other roles for making some stupid, borderline racist comments, kicked them off with a 15 minute tour de force on ubiquity of ‘woke’ dominance, followed by an impressive contribution from the sociologist (and Academy of Ideas intellectual) Frank Furedi.
In the afternoon, leader William Clouston gave a typically thoughtful and also crowd-pleasing address that was let down by being virtually inaudible in parts until a woman plucked up the courage to shout out and tell him to speak louder.