Social Democratic Party (UK)

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A T-shirt featuring their original motif as used in the UK.

Will fit Teen, Young Adult and Adults.

All items are recolourable, but the logos aren’t.

Please also find a collection of four poster pictures available as pictures for your Sims 3 game, along with that of their famous diamond shaped poster which used to adorn street furnishing during the 1980s.

The poster pictures use a mesh with many thanks by Yarona at Sims Modeli, so you do not need any stuff packs for this to work – it’s all base game friendly.

Download

To use, download, unzip, and drop the contained folder into your The Sims 3\mods\packages folder and they should show up.

Enjoy!

The Social Democratic Party was arguably the first UK political party to be specifically media orientated to compensate for a lack of mass members, which was ironically to prove their nemesis later. They were something of a ‘joke’ party for their unapologetic populism and membership largely drawn from middle class ‘bleedheart’ libertarians, ie. socially left-wing but economically right-wing, right down to their preference for serving claret wine at party fundraisers.

The party’s roots stemmed from the early 1970s when concern began over Trotskyite groups (especially Militant and the Socialist Workers Party) infiltrating weak branches of the left-wing Labour Party in ‘safe’ seats and trade unions in order to secure their members to high office – sometimes with intimidation or outright violence.

On 25th January 1981, the Social Democratic Party – or SDP for short – was formed after the so-called Limehouse Declaration , primarily from disillusioned members of Labour’s ‘Manifesto’ movement, but by the end of the year almost two-thirds of the members had no previous party political experience before – a repeat of what happened in the early 1970s with the National Front, and what was to happen later in the early 1990s with the Green Party and early 2000s with the United Kingdom Independence Party.

The SDP’s appeal to the public was less its policies than the simple fact the electorate was so fed up with the other parties which had brought them nothing but misery (in particular mass unemployment, welfare cuts and record violent crime levels) they were willing to back anyone outside of the established parties offering something different (although their original leaders and MPs all came from these) – and the more media savvy SDP were able to exploit this to the hilt.

In particular, safe Labour seats where the local branch had been taken over by Trotskyite thugs were highly susceptible to supporting the SDP – who won two famous (and very ill-tempered) by-elections in Bermondsey (1983) and Greenwich (1987) as a result. The SDP also won Hillhead in 1981 because the Labour candidate was the subject of ridicule as a famous Loch Ness Monster ‘chaser’.

The party agreed an electoral alliance with the Liberal Party, and looked on course to win the next General Election with ease, but the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s popularity soared after Britain won the 1982 Falklands War (even though it had been her party’s incompetence which had led to it by fooling Argentina into thinking Britain wouldn’t attempt to liberate it) and thanks to the Labour Party concentrating more of its resources on unseating the SDP ‘traitors’ than on beating the Tories, the SDP-Liberal Alliance finished a poor third in terms of seats won.

After further disappointment in 1987, the bulk of the party merged with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats the next year, but a continuing SDP (and Liberal Party) lived on – mainly Eurosceptic members or those fearing that their ideals would be too heavily diluted in the merged party. Relations between SDP branches and Liberal branches had long been poor – and many members simply dropped out of politics altogether upon the merger.

Disaster stuck after they finished behind the Official Monster Raving Loony at the 1990 first Bootle by-election (which also happened to the Liberal candidate at the second). Even though they’d almost taken the safe Tory seat of Richmond in a by-election the year before, such was the public humiliation from being beaten by an OMRLP candidate that days later the remaining SDP members of Parliament voted to dissolve the party without even bothering to consult the membership.

Some however vowed to carry on and ran the Liberal Democrats close at the Neath by-election of 1992. After this however, the party has since faded away to a handful of members holding a number of council seats, especially in Neath and the seaside town of Bridlington where they ran the council for many years – something the SDP in its Parliamentary seats heyday never managed to accomplish anywhere at all.