https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/is-realignment-coming-to-british-po
In the U.K., a small group of Labour Members of Parliament joined by an even smaller group of Tory MPs have formed a politically centrist coalition, the Independent Group (TIG). Though the influence of these disgruntled and Europhile MPs is debatable, the fear of more defections may help explain why the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is now backing a second Brexit vote.
But beyond Brexit, it is also possible that TIG will preempt a more significant political realignment. After all, it’s happened before.
In 1981, a group of Labour MPs who were disgruntled by the increasing leftward lurch of their party broke away and formed the Social Democratic party (SDP). The SDP orientated itself as left-of-center, pro-European, and in support of a moderate and mixed economy. In 1983, under the hard-left leadership of Neil Kinnock, the Labour party set out an explicitly socialist party manifesto — in what one Labour MP famously called “the longest suicide note in history.”
That the Labour party’s explicitly socialist policies were unpopular was proven in the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the year that the Conservatives won with a 43-seat majority — which was the largest electoral swing since 1945. Thatcher’s election in 1979 also began 18 years of uninterrupted Conservative rule — the longest party ruling in British history.
Learning the hard way then, by the mid-’90s, the Labour party reoriented along more centrist lines, and at the 1994 Labour party conference, then leader Tony Blair heralded the arrival of “New Labour.” New Labour rejected socialism, conceded the most popular economic policies of Thatcherism — anti-inflation, low taxation, trade-union reforms, and free-market favorability — and added progressive social values and pro-European and anti-Unionist stances (e.g. devolution for Scotland).
Such a profound change in the party was, naturally, accompanied by a profound change in its base. Under Blair, New Labour consciously ceased to be the party of the working class — as it had been historically — and rather tried to appeal to highly educated, middle-class liberals where it saw its future. But from this, disillusionment with hypocrisy and elitism followed. The working class felt disaffected. Some voted Tory instead.
