As a former SDP candidate, Polly Toynbee warns the Labour party against splitting (Opinion, 26 January). But the really damaging split in British politics was possibly the next one that she also supported when David Owen rejected the vote of his own SDP members to form his own breakaway party. But for this, the Liberal Democrats would have been much better placed in the 1990s to be part of a progressive alliance based on commitment to proportional representation. Such an alliance might also have been established in 2005, but for voters doing what she then advised: to “put a peg on their noses and vote Labour” in spite of Iraq etc. It may be some time before a more compassionate government can be elected in the UK (if it survives) and it will probably only be when it is accepted that majority government by any party with 37% of the vote or less is not democratic.
Chris Rennard
Liberal Democrat, House of Lords
• In writing her 1980s history lesson for Labour and Jeremy Corbyn, Polly Toynbee manages to airbrush the Liberal party out of the picture. In her penultimate paragraph she makes a passing, double-edged mention of the “now moribund Lib Dems”, and that is it.
Indeed, the SDP was very popular in the polls when it launched in 1981, but it was in alliance with the Liberal party, and with the substantial working support of Liberals in local government and on the ground in the constituencies. The Liberal-SDP Alliance achieved 27% of the vote in 1983 and 25% in 1987 – far from the solely SDP achievements that Polly Toynbee implies. The votes in 1987 had not, of course, produced the rightful number of seats so the majority of both Liberal and SDP members quickly recognised that there was no room for “two third parties” under the electoral system. This led to the merger in 1988 that created the Liberal Democrats. David Owen and his minority rump of SDP supporters refused to join the merged party and collapsed as a political entity within 18 months.
The Liberal Democrats, on the other hand, went on to increase their 1983 number of MPs from 23 (six SDP, 17 Liberal) to 63 and, five years later, play a valuable five-year role in government, even if they got absolutely no electoral reward for doing so.
Adrian Slade
Last president of the pre-merger Liberal party 1987-98
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