Is a new political party for Remainers really the way forward?

Shocked Remainers want a new political party — pro-European, ‘pro-business’ and free of any viscerally right- or left-wing taint. They anxiously insist that it will not be like the SDP in the early 1980s, but it is hard to see why not.

Both then and now, the appeal is to a particular idea of virtue in politics. Then as now, the new party defines itself by its distaste for people it sees as unvirtuous and lower-class. Then as now, it therefore lacks roots outside bits of London, university towns, and the well-off and well-educated.

Above all — then as now — the new party underestimates the capacity of the Tory party to resist its appeal and of the Labour party, however useless its leader, somehow to survive. There is one important difference between 1981 and now, however. The SDP was not hitching itself to the losing side in a popular vote. This proposed new party would be.