Marx famously noted, following Hegel, "that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice...the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." Today's splinter from Labour of 7 sitting MPs to the new "Independent Group" seems to pale in comparison to that other defection to the right in 1981, of the Gang of 4 which formed the Social Democratic Party. In this classic article, written during crisis in Labour precipitated by the SDP split, Stuart Hall analyses the ideology of social democracy and the meaning of the SDP.
