What’s wrong with the SDP?

Geoffrey Hawthorn

  • Capitalism and Social Democracy by Adam Przeworksi
    Cambridge, 269 pp, £25.00, May 1985, ISBN 0 521 26742 0

Those who voted for the Alliance at the last election tended to be as hostile as Tories to nationalisation. They were nearly as fierce about the Unions too. But they were well disposed to redistribution, as keen on creating jobs as those who’d voted Labour, and on several of the ‘moral’ issues markedly more liberal. Who are they? Tories had the vote of two-thirds of the managers in private concerns; Labour of two-thirds of the workers in public ones; the Alliance, of nearly half of all graduates.[*] They are, in Julian Critchley’s description, ‘the examination-passing classes’. Decent people.

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[*] How Britain votes by Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell and John Curtice.