1976-1988
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The Alliance: parties and leaders
How successful was the Alliance? Was merger the right road to follow? The case against.
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The Alliance: two-party cooperation in practice
How did Liberals and Social Democrats cope with the mechanics of alliance?
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Alliance days
Vignettes of the days of elation and experiment, frustration and failure.
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The merger debate in the SDP 1981-87
The history of the SDP-Liberal relationship, from beginnings to alliance to merger.
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The SDP’s ideological legacy
What was the ideological inheritance of the Social Democratic Party? And what did it bequeath to the Liberal Democrats?
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Young Liberals; the ‘Red Guard’ era
The role of foreign policy issues in the growth of the Young Liberals in the 1960s and ’70s.
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Report: from Beveridge to Blair
Report of LDHG meeting of September 1997 on the welfare state, with Frank Field MP and Nick Timmins.
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A Party for what?
Review of Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party (Oxford University Press, 1995).
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Richard Holme on the merger negotiations
My recollections of the process which led to the merger of the Liberal Party and the SDP are hazy since I am not a diary-keeper. Nor can I give anything but an outsider's view of the formal merger negotiations since, to my chagrin at the time, I was not elected to be a member of…