Is the Democratic Party the most ideologically diverse in the world?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I suppose you could say that...but it's important to keep in mind that it's not really a "political party" in the conventional sense. Same is true about the Republicans, of course.

Well that's at least one person I've got through to

[Filuwaúrdjan]

in many ways they were the prelude to New Labour.

lolno

You basically had three groups of MPs who defected to the SDP: small 'l' liberal bourgeois Labour types who had given up entirely on the mother party, but who thought that the Liberal Party was a joke, Labour right-wingers who had fallen out with local Labour lefties and who wanted to recreate the Labour Party as it had been (in their memory anyway) twenty years earlier (almost all of these ended up rejoining Labour officially or in spirit some time after losing their seats), and the moronic careerist hacks who didn't really believe in anything and who miscalculated hee-lar-ree-oss-lee. On top of this, you have to add a large number of people outside (some of which were actually rather right-wing) who joined the SDP because the SDP were new and shiny and the other three parties were neither of those things.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Oh no, most of the important figures moved over from the Left  (including the Honourable Member for Sedgefield) and continued to think (and operate) accordingly. The SDP was totally rooted on the Right and was a reaction to internal political defeat. It wasn't a prelude to anything because the one direction that it did not (could not) look in was forwards.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Right wingers were only one of your three definitions. "Liberal bourgeois Labour types" fits a lot of them - including the Honourable Member for Sedgefield - spot on.

In the World of the Labour Party before the split, 'liberal bourgeois types' were on the Right by definition.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Maybe, but we are talking about New Labour here. I was just pointing out, that your description of SDP fitted New Labour.

Only if you are absolutely determined to make it do so. Besides, the key point about the SDP is that those groups knitted together do not a halfway coherent political party make. It was an extreme reaction to unusual circumstances, and did not foreshadow anything because it was not capable of thinking about the future.

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You're missing the point; context is everything because meanings can (and so do) change. The sort of Labour politicians who could be thought of as being liberals with a small 'l' in 1977 had remarkably little in common with the sort of Labour politicians who could be thought of as liberals with a small 'l' (as well as other things) in 1997, something that mostly reflects the different backgrounds (traditional Party establishment 'intellectuals' as opposed to former radicals; even if you ignore the age gap, these people won't even have socialised with each other much).  But, with regards to the SDP and so on, what matters is that the former essentially comprised an identifiable faction within the Party, while the latter could be found anywhere (so more a matter of attitudes on certain issues).