Britain Family Feud

After months of wrangling, the Social Democratic Party dismembered itself last week. At the University of Sheffield in central England, party delegates voted 273 to 28 to merge with the nearly twice as large Liberal Party. The two centrist groups had been partners under the Alliance banner since 1981, and began talking merger when their candidates won only 22 of 650 seats in last year's parliamentary elections. But while their formal marriage was intended to strengthen future showings, it sealed a bitter divorce between the Social Democrats and former Leader David Owen, who co-founded the party in 1981. Arguing that the Social Democrats would be swallowed up by the Liberals, Owen bolted with a clutch of followers to form a new party, the Campaign for Social Democracy.

Emotions ran so high before the vote that Owen's backers refused to sleep in the same hotel as the promerger forces. Social Democratic President Shirley Williams angrily accused Owen, a former Labor Foreign Minister, of "acting with impetuosity at the moment of crisis" and warned that "all of us will be losers" if the proposed union did not pass. "Mergerites" tried to block a rally that Owen had called to launch his group, but they backed down after both sides assembled legal teams.

The vote delighted members of the Liberal Party, which approved the merger three weeks ago. Liberal Party Leader David Steel said the wide margin of approval "means that both parties can go forward together not just with confidence but with enthusiasm." Robert Maclennan, who succeeded Owen as head of the Social Democrats, declared that the newly formed party "has a great opportunity to take British politics out of the straitjacket of Conservative dominance."

Britain's political lineup will now pit the newly created Social and Liberal Democrats and Owen's breakaway party against the leftist Laborites and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives. Though the new parties hope to weaken the Conservatives' mandate, they could have precisely the opposite effect. By dividing an already weak opposition even further, they just might give Maggie Thatcher's Tories a real shot at governing England for the rest of the century.