Recognising the threat from Reform UK, Keir Starmer has overhauled his Cabinet in order to project a tougher stance on immigration. Yet, simultaneously, he faces challenges rising from the Left, too.

At the weekend, Zarah Sultana claimed that the party she co-founded with Jeremy Corbyn had over 750,000 people registrations, and that “Labour is dead.” Along with the Greens, who elected Zack Polanski as their leader last week, this new initiative is poised to damage Labour in future elections.

Rallying the support of disgruntled socialists, as well as voters motivated by what they consider Labour’s complicity in genocide in Gaza, Corbyn’s party could capture seats in diverse urban constituencies in London and across England. If the Left wishes to maximise damage to Labour — and it’s clear that it does — then “Your Party” and the Greens need to come to an arrangement, and quickly.

One model for this should be the last time there was a significant breakaway party from Labour: the formation of the Social Democratic Party in 1981. Although the SDP involved defectors from Labour’s Right rather than Left, the example is still instructive as to how an insurgent new party and an existing smaller party can cooperate to maximise their electoral strength.

The SDP, founded by four former Labour Cabinet ministers, argued that under Michael Foot the party had gone too far to the Left. They wanted Labour to be more pro-European, pro-nuclear, pro-Nato, and pro-capitalism. The only problem for the SDP was that there was already a centrist party which held all of those positions: the Liberals.

A month after the SDP’s founding, co-leaders Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers had lunch with Liberal leader David Steel at a conference in Germany to agree a pact. Known as the Königswinter Agreement, the SDP and Liberals would announce a joint set of aims and agree not to stand against each other in elections. In May 1981, Williams and Steel waved in the air a joint policy document of shared principles.

That summer, the Liberals stood aside for the SDP’s Roy Jenkins to contest a by-election in Warrington. To the shock of many, he nearly won. A few weeks later, the SDP stood aside in Croydon for Liberal candidate Bill Pitt, who shockingly won the seat. Then, to cap it off, at the end of the year Shirley Williams won the hitherto safe Tory seat of Crosby. In each contest, not only had the Liberals and SDP stood aside for each other, but they had actively campaigned for each other. Williams campaigned for Pitt in Croydon; Steel campaigned for Williams in Crosby.

The parties came to an arrangement whereby the majority of winnable seats in the upcoming general election would be contested by the Liberals but Steel’s party agreed that, whatever the election result, it would support Roy Jenkins — by then SDP leader — to be prime minister.

These arrangements were not easily agreed. SDP co-leader David Owen was privately grumpy about it all. Liberal activists, notoriously independent and bloody-minded, resisted fiercely. Yet Jenkins and Steel recognised that the only way they could make a breakthrough under the first-past-the-post electoral system was to cooperate.

The factors that made the SDP-Liberal Alliance work appear to be missing in the chemistry between the Greens and Corbyn’s new party. Steel set aside his own ego, including forsaking his claim to the premiership, for the sake of a wider political cause. Spitting Image mocked Steel as a little puppet in David Owen’s pocket, but in fact he was making a personal sacrifice for the sake of the Alliance. Would Polanski or Corbyn be willing to do the same?

Additionally, both the Liberals and the SDP had to set aside “purity tests” of one another. While there was significant overlap between the two parties, there were inevitably differences on policies including privatisation of the mines. They chose to focus on their commonalities rather than their differences, with an “agree to disagree” approach where there were rare differences. In contrast, there already seem to be differences within the Corbyn-Green nexus over social issues such as gender identity.

If the Left wants to take its revenge on Starmer’s Labour Party, then the example of the SDP is worth following. If talks between Corbyn and Polanski are not already happening, they need to start.

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Richard Johnson is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at Queen Mary University of London.

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