Abstract
DEVELOPMENTS IN BRITISH POLITICS BETWEEN JULY AND NOVember 1981 - Roy Jenkins's near-win in the Warrington byelection, the capture of Croydon North-West by the Liberal/SDP Alliance and Shirley Williams's triumph in Crosby - strongly suggest that the British party-system may never be the same again. Although it was possible to argue that the Warrington result reflected no more than the impact of a famous candidate on a situation of public hostility towards the two major parties in a working-class constituency, the Croydon result, which gave victory to a Liberal candidate with a long record of earlier failures, and which gave the Alliance 40 per cent of the votes in a seat where the Liberal Party's organization had been almost as non-existent as the SDP's, cannot be dismissed so easily. These by-election results, together with an impressive run of local election successes for the Alliance, and continuing evidence from the opinion polls, strongly suggest that British politics, as the SDP's leaders have proclaimed, must be entering a new phase.
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