FAQs
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I was attracted by the ambition of the New Declaration to establish a radical centre, moving beyond the exhausted politics of left and right.
The SDP's combination of an interventionist economic programme with a commitment to nation, family and community made sense to me. It offered a serious alternative to the failure of both Labour and the Conservatives.
I was looking for a party that welcomed people who were prepared to get involved and make a difference.
I wasn't looking for another political leader to follow. I wanted to join a party where members could take responsibility for shaping our future.
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My campaign begins with a simple message: No one is coming to save us.
If we believe that Britain needs a different kind of politics, we have to take responsibility for making it happen. That applies just as much to building the SDP as it does to rebuilding our country.
I'm standing because I believe we have the ideas, talent and determination to become a serious political force. But no leader can achieve that alone.
That's why I'm taking my programme to the membership and asking for a mandate to lead a collective effort to build a stronger, more effective SDP.
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It means working out what you are able and willing to do to build a political party that is capable of ensuring that Britain can maintain itself as a peaceful and prosperous, political community in the face of the stormy waters ahead.
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We are committed first and foremost to the national interest. That means that we are concerned to identify what government needs to do to uphold our common interests in a unified and stable political community in Britain. Above all it means we are committed to raising the productivity of British industry and securing strategic industries. But we also recognise that we need to identify the compromises of sectional interests of class, locality, identity, religion that are necessary if we are to uphold the common interest. We are not committed to private profit or to state welfare for their own sake. We are committed to both but only in so far as they serve the common interest.
Labour, Conservatives, Lib Dems, and SNP have presided over decades of underinvestment in housing and infrastructure. Their promises to reverse that have no credibility. The Tories are clearly the sectional party of big business and the assetocracy. Labour are the party of public sector management and their hangers on in the EDI industry. We are the party of the whole nation.