JUST a few weeks after the Social Democratic Party was launched in 1981, it was claiming 50,000 members. To resurrect a period expression more usually spoken in relation to the Top 30 chart, the SDP even went number one with a bullet; before its official formation, the pollsters rated it the most popular political force in Britain. Yet younger readers of this blog can readily be forgiven for never even having heard of them.

Such was the fate of the last attempt by a hardcore faction of Labour rightwingers to have a go at what the buzzword of the time described as ‘breaking the mould’. If the Blairite groupuscule currently said to be considering a repeat performance think that anybody is going to be heartbroken if they jump over to the Liberal Democrats, that only underlines how far out of touch they are with either the voting public or the wider labour movement. Let’s put it this way. They will not be taking any electoral clout with them.

Any notion that their defection will constitute ‘a realignment of British politics’ on the lines of 28 years ago testifies most loudly to their immense arrogance. Years after the limos stopped turning up at their doorsteps, these guys actually believe that somehow they still matter.

Check out some of the kite flying exercises. Apparently the Blairites are fearful that Labour is ‘lurching to the left’, with the purely symbolic 50p tax rate about the only hard evidence they can evince. Laughably, the architects of Labour’s impending general election devastation insist that this move alone – which has proved if anything rather popular – will result in meltdown at the polling booth next year.

Hence this little-noticed prediction from columnist Anatole Kaletsky in the Times last week:

The remnants of new Labour [will] probably split off and join the Liberal Democrats who would become the dominant left-of-centre party, while Brownites and old Labour activists would form an explicitly socialist party.

Kaletsky’s prognosis is plainly flawed on two key points. First, there is no meaningful sense in which the Lib Dems – with or without a handful of Blairite has-beens by way of a new ingredient in the soap powder – can be described as ‘left of centre’.

Second, the Brownites have been an integral part of New Labourism since the birth of what we used to call ‘the project’. Differences with Blairism have been differences of personality rather than substance. Accordingly, they do not have the capacity to form part of an ‘explicitly socialist party’.

Nevertheless, the speculation was concretised over the weekend by Lord Ashdown’s interview with the Daily Telegraph, in which he claimed that ‘Labour MPs disillusioned with Gordon Brown’s leadership have held private talks with the Liberal Democrats about defecting’.

There are signs that certain constituency parties are growing really Left-wing. Senior Labour figures have said to me, ‘If that happens, I’m off’.

Such a contention – which of course fits squarely with the Daily Telegraph view of the world – was allowed to pass unchallenged. If any constituency parties were ‘growing really leftwing’, I’d be the first to cheer. Sadly, I can see little basis in reality for the idea.

Let’s just say that nobody on the Labour left is urging the Blairites to stay. But if split happens, it will be based not on any updated Limehouse Declaration, but what could more appropriately be called a Winehouse Declaration, based on the simple desire to move from one party to another once the highs run out. Anyone thinking of making the switch should bear in mind that the Lib Dems are reportedly no longer doing any Charlie these days.