Lord Newby Interview

Torrin Wilkins: First of all, thank you, Lord Newby, for coming into the conversation. My name is Torrin Wilkins, the Director of the Centre Think Tank. You are the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords, and you were the National Secretary of the SDP between 1983 and 1988. We are running a series on the Social Democratic Party, and we have been speaking to different people who were involved in the party. We previously spoke to Lord Owen about his views on the Social Democratic Party, and we will also be speaking to some people in the Liberal Democrats about their views. The first question I wanted to ask is how you got involved in the Social Democratic Party. I know you used to be in the Civil Service, and then you left to join the Social Democrats. What made you leave, and why did you think that the Social Democratic Party was the party for you, rather than the Liberals or the Labour Party?

Lord Newby: At the time, I had been a member of the Labour Party for 10 years. I had been very much involved in the Labour Party’s internal debates about Europe, and I played a big part, spending a lot of time in the referendum campaign in 1975, campaigning for our membership of the EU. I had been active in Labour until shortly before leaving the Civil Service, but then I was promoted to a role where political activity was not allowed.

I was working on tax policy, and in 1981, when the Social Democratic Party was formed, several things happened at the same time. First of all, the government was introducing a policy which it knew would push up unemployment. I, along with most civil servants working on economic policy, thought that was a bad thing to do. There was a lot of dissatisfaction about that.

The Social Democratic Party was in the process of being formed. I knew a lot of the people who were involved because I had been on the Committee for Europe for a long time, and I was very sympathetic to what they were doing. I rang up a man called John Roper, who was the first whip for the Social Democratic Party, an MP for a Lancashire seat, and said, “Is there anything I can do?” He said, “Well, I am just advertising for somebody to run the parliamentary office. If you would like to do it, that would be great, but you must apply overnight because nominations close, and applications close tomorrow.” So I applied. Lots of things came together, but it was dissatisfaction with the state of the economy, dissatisfaction with the Tories and the sense that Labour had very much become lost.

Torrin Wilkins: The Limehouse Declaration was released, which placed heavy focus on electoral reform and on devolution as well. How much impact did that declaration have, and especially the then launch of the Social Democratic Party, which carried on many of those sorts of fundamental principles? What kind of impact did that have on politics at the time?

Lord Newby: It sent a shockwave through politics. There was a huge amount of interest in what the Social Democratic Party was doing because there was a lot of dissatisfaction with the Thatcher government at that stage, which was very unpopular, and the Labour Party, which was also very unpopular. The fact that you have four former cabinet ministers who were prepared to make a big throw of the dice and start something new was very, very refreshing. For a lot of the people involved, it was very exciting in a way that you cannot easily explain.

There was a real sense, for the period between 1981 and the 83 election, that there was a huge sense of excitement and a sense that you could change things. I think that went through the country, and that is why we did so well in the by-elections in that first period.

Torrin Wilkins: After that, you had the Falklands War. That is often seen as a turning point for the Social Democratic Party and the point at which the merger with the Liberals became almost inevitable. Do you think that it was the Falklands War that caused that decline, or was it the use of the first-past-the-post system, and there have been plenty of other explanations, but why do you think there was that decline?

Lord Newby: What the Falklands War did was transform public perceptions of Margaret Thatcher. She suddenly became, if not a national hero, then clearly a strong national leader who had bet everything on our being successful in the Falklands and won. She suddenly, in a country which was lacking political leadership or strong political leadership and looking for it, which is why a lot of people look towards the Social Democratic Party, demonstrated it.

Suddenly, what happened was that she drew from the Social Democratic Party and the Liberals a considerable part of the moderate Conservative vote, who had been interested in us. At the time, I was in charge of, amongst other things, the membership department for the Social Democratic Party. The number of new members was running steadily, up until the Falklands War. Then it was halved in a week, and we never went back. Because she had taken the political initiative and we could not, we never quite got it back.

Torrin Wilkins: Do you think that first-past-the-post acted as a stint on the growth of the Social Democratic Party, because they were getting massive vote shares and yet were getting almost nothing back in seats?

Lord Newby: The ludicrous thing in 1983 was that the Alliance received 23 seats, and we were only two points behind Labour, who received over 200. We were at a point where opinion polls on the weekend before polling day suggested we might just overtake Labour. It would have been quite possible for us to overtake Labour and have received 30 seats, and for them to have received 200. Obviously, it was a huge drag anchor holding us back. Our problem was simply that our vote was spread too evenly over the country.

Torrin Wilkins: One other thing that we did was we spoke to Lord Owen recently and asked him about his opinions, which I think is fairly well known now, about the merger between the Liberals and the Social Democratic Party. Of course, he would argue that the merger effectively stifled that voice of social Democrats, which in some ways is quite funny, given that I am speaking to you as the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords.

How much of a voice do you think the Social Democratic Party and the social democratic tradition have within the Liberal Democrats today?

Lord Newby: I think it had a very strong voice. I do not think, frankly, the main reason that Lord Owen would pose as the reason for the merger was because he feared for social democracy. He could not stomach the idea of what he saw as an over-democratic party that was soft on defence. Those were his principal arguments at the time.

The interesting thing is, if you look at the leadership of the Liberal Democrats, as I look at you now, straight ahead of me are portraits of the leaders of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords. It goes Roy Jenkins, Bill Rogers, Shirley Williams, and Tom McNally were the first four. So they were all from the Social Democratic Party. Charles Kennedy was obviously in the Social Democratic Party. Very quickly, the merged party stopped worrying very much about whether people had been liberals or the Social Democratic Party. David Owen is wrong. The reason is that there was no fundamental difference of view on tax and spend and on social democratic values between liberals and social democrats. The liberals came from a different tradition, although arguably the new liberals in the early 20th century were the first social democrats. There was no schism in the new party. There were personal differences, but there were no huge ideological schisms between the two.

Torrin Wilkins: How easy was that merger? A lot of the time, when I was a member of the party, there would often be conversations about how it used to be if you were a social democrat or a liberal, and now people very much just see themselves as Liberal Democrats, and there is no longer that dividing line. How easy was it in those early days when the two parties were coming together?

Lord Newby: The merger process was both exhausting and extraordinarily stressful because at the time, the Owenites had a majority on the Social Democratic Party National Committee. Instead of doing the decent thing and saying we lost the ballot, we are withdrawing, they stood their ground and tried to get every possible advantage from that position. At one point, they argued that they should retain access to a proportion of the assets of the party, but the party decided it did not want that. The merger process, which lasted from September to January, involved the actual negotiations that were very intense. We had two constitutions. We had different ways of doing things. We had large negotiating groups, and the devil was in the details. I was my opposite, the chief executive in effect of the Social Democratic Party, together with my opposite number in the Liberal Party; we managed that process, but it was inevitably just very hard going because you are trying to put together two somewhat different ways of doing things.

Torrin Wilkins: On more recent politics, in 2019, when Change UK was founded, they were similar to the Social Democratic Party, since they split from the Labour Party, and their tagline was an updated version of breaking the mould, changing politics. Why do you think that they did not have that same impact and that same effect, even when they launched as the Social Democratic Party did?

Lord Newby: There are probably three reasons. First of all, there already were Liberal Democrats. Secondly, with all due respect to them, they were not the Gang of Four. Thirdly, they lacked the commonality of approach which people who joined the Social Democratic Party had. The whole push came from people who had been in the Labour Party, who shared values. In the case of Change UK, there was not that degree of commonality of view. It was a group of individuals who, for a variety of reasons, could not stomach being at their party anymore. They did not, you see, have a compelling vision for what was different between them and anybody else.

Torrin Wilkins: Thinking about New Labour, it was the other large force in politics. How much impact do you think the Social Democratic Party had on it? The other day I was watching “A Very Social Democrat”, which was about Roy Jenkins, describing how he often portrayed himself as an adviser to Tony Blair on how to run the party. How much impact do you think the Social Democratic Party had on New Labour?

Lord Newby: The Social Democratic Party had a big impact on New Labour, not least on someone like Peter Mandelson, who I knew and knew very well from university days, who was always looking over his shoulder at the Social Democratic Party and the Liberal Democrats as being potentially a great threat to Labour. I do not think Tony Blair needed any impetus in terms of where he positioned himself, because I think he was, in my view, more of a Christian Democrat than a Social Democrat. For people like Peter Mandelson, they were just worried that the Liberal Democrats could steal some of their clothes if they were not careful. Which could be one of the reasons why, for example, there were the Cook-McLennan talks and why Blair embraced so much constitutional reform, which in his heart he was not interested in. I think it did have, however, I am not going to over exaggerate it, they were their people and there were substantial figures in their own right and certainly someone like Gordon Brown was not very much influenced by it, but, I think others were to a greater extent.

Torrin Wilkins: You spoke earlier about that sense of excitement that was built about the Social Democratic Party and the change after the Limehouse Declaration happened. Is there any way that you can see that we get that back today? Meaning, especially with the fact that we also have a very unpopular government at the moment that is struggling to keep one chancellor along. How do we, or is there any way that we can get back to that under the current system?

Lord Newby: I do not think you can; you can never replicate a historic anomaly, which is what the Social Democratic Party was, frankly. Can we get a sense of excitement about what the party’s doing? We did in the by-elections; there was a real, tangible sense of excitement there. There were some places in the local elections where we were able to fight very hard and win.

Is there a tangible excitement in following a football team? That is when you are winning. Winning is all that matters in politics at one level. You have got to start with principles and all that, but they count for nothing if you cannot persuade people. The excitement to me is if we can persuade people that what we believe is the best way to run society, they agree with it. That is always the challenge. But that is the way, and that is what we have got to do. We have got to be able to say, and I now we have got a particular challenge and opportunity because we are coming out of an age of prosperity into an age of, it is not an age of austerity so much, as an age of low growth, if any growth and the country is going to be faced with really difficult decisions. The challenge for us is how to answer the question, What is the best form of society, and what is a good society in an age of tight finances? That is a lot of the things we talk about: community, participation, fairness, tolerance, those are the things that people want in their society.

What we have to do is to explain that at a time when people are feeling very uncertain, and they are thinking to themselves, I am not going to be able to do things as I did in the past. We have got to be able to persuade them that our vision of that fair, tolerant, open society offers them the prospect of a better life at a time when greater affluence is no longer guaranteed. The truth is, for a lot of people, for the foreseeable future, they are not.

Torrin Wilkins: Well, thank you so much for answering the questions today and for coming on the conversation.

Lord Newby: Pleasure.

Note: This interview has been edited for grammar, clarity, and flow. The original recording is the final and definitive version.