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

[politicus]

No, PMBD, PRI in Mexico, the Congress Party and - as Nathan pointed out - most Japanese parties are more diverse than the US Democrats.

[politicus]

No one else is thinking of the Congress Party of India?

Yes. They were on my list.

[politicus]

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.

Thats actually a pretty good dscription of New Labour

[politicus]

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.

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.

[politicus]

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.

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

Blair is and always was the essence of "bourgeois Liberal" and the same goes for most of his crowd. Some may in the beginning have tried to style themselves as leftys, but they never truly where. Just upper middle class boys putting on an act.