They are doing better recently than I realised!
The SDP is the anti-futility party
Rod Liddle
The Spectator - 15 October 2022
We have recently evicted a Labour councillor from Middleton in Leeds, a seat which they had never previously lost. The SDP won (in a seat consisting of about 20,000 voters) with more votes than all of the other candidates combined, a victory occasioned by our candidate, Wayne Dixon, putting aside his sense of futility for five years and persuading people. In the end, when the Middleton voters put aside their sense of futility, they did so en masse and suddenly discovered it had not been futile after all.
The defeated candidate was young and middle-class and he was not terribly gracious at the count, bless him. Throughout the campaign Wayne had to put up with the usual barrage of mud-slinging, defamation and bullying from the Labour party, beginning of course with the accusation that he was ‘racist’, with not the slightest shred of evidence and despite the fact that Wayne is at least partly from Traveller stock. Their hatred had no bounds, because they knew that the game was up – and now the good people of Middleton have a white working--class bloke who knows how to define the word ‘woman’ representing them – which I daresay the left will think is regressive and beyond the pale, but which makes him truly representative of the area.
Shortly after this win, a councillor in Derbyshire defected to the SDP from the Tories because – for reasons which you may well be beginning to comprehend – he found his party absurd. More recently a fairly prominent Conservative donor has decided that it would be slightly less futile to bung the SDP some dosh than it would be to carry on giving it to the complacent and arrogant Tories. These are small victories, sure – but they have a significance. We would of course benefit from proportional representation, but even without it we will continue to chip away at the walls of futility until futility gives up the ghost.
The conference was well attended and featured excellent speeches from the likes of Joanna Williams, Peter Whittle and a charming and benevolent John Cleese – the latter a nice twist, because at last year’s conference, Lionel Shriver had compared us to the People’s Front of Judaea: another intimation of futility, but one which was met with surprisingly good humour.
One of our problems is that we are a proper party with a comprehensive set of policies which have evolved over the years, rather than being a transient phenomenon like Reform or Reclaim or Regurgitate, what-ever, which can make up policy on the hoof and doesn’t care if it makes not the slightest bit of sense. We are the only mainstream party which doesn’t bob down on to one knee in a spasm of hyperliberal self-abnegation and which knows that it is unequivocally wrong for men who wish to define themselves as women to insist, under the law, that the rest of us have to define them thus as well. It’s a fiver to join.
(The rest of the article he is rambling on about food!)
Fingers crossed this link works:
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