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ent Attlee. Labour was also in government from 1964 to 1970
under Harold Wilson and from 1974 to 1979, first under Wilson
and then James Callaghan.
The Labour Party was last in national government between
1997 and 2010 under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, beginning
with a majority of 179, reduced to 167 in 2001 and 66 in 2005.
Having won 258 seats in the 2010 general election, the party cur-
rently forms the Official Opposition in the Parliament of the
United Kingdom.
Labour has a minority government in the Welsh Assembly,
is the main opposition party in the Scottish Parliament and has
13 MEPs in the European Parliament, sitting in the Socialists and
Democrats group. The Labour Party is a member of the Socialist
International and Party of European Socialists. The current
leader of the party is Ed Miliband MP.
/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Party/
The SDP-Liberal Alliance. The Social Democratic Party
(SDP) was a centrist political party in the United Kingdom that
was created on 26 March 1981 and existed until 1988.
It was founded by four senior Labour Party 'moderates',
dubbed the 'Gang of Four': Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rod-
gers and Shirley Williams. At the time of the SDP's creation,
Owen and Rodgers were sitting Labour Members of Parliament
(MPs); Jenkins had left Parliament in 1977 to serve as President
of the European Commission, while Williams had lost her seat in
the 1979 general election.
The four left the Labour Party as a result of policy changes
enacted at the January 1981 Wembley conference which commit-
ted the party to unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal
from the European Economic Community.
They also believed that Labour had become too left-wing,
and had been infiltrated at constituency level by Trotskyist fac-
tions whose views and behaviour they considered to be at odds
with the Parliamentary Labour Party and Labour voters. For the
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