1976-1988
Alliance days
Vignettes of the days of elation and experiment, frustration and failure.
The merger debate in the SDP 1981-87
The history of the SDP-Liberal relationship, from beginnings to alliance to merger.
The SDP’s ideological legacy
What was the ideological inheritance of the Social Democratic Party? And what did it bequeath to the Liberal Democrats?
Young Liberals; the ‘Red Guard’ era
The role of foreign policy issues in the growth of the Young Liberals in the 1960s and ’70s.
Report: from Beveridge to Blair
Report of LDHG meeting of September 1997 on the welfare state, with Frank Field MP and Nick Timmins.
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).
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…
Labour’s right wing
Review of Stephen Meredith, Labours Old and New: The Parliamentary Right of the British Labour Party 1970-79 and the Roots of New Labour (Manchester University Press, 2008).
Alliance, Liberals and the SDP
1971 – 1985: the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland was born in the midst of the Troubles, in April 1970. This article looks back at the party’s history and its relationships with the Liberal Party and the SDP.