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Whilst it may seem a no-brainer for the third and fourth largest parties in a two party system to work together it might it not have gone any further than an informal alliance along the lines of the Gladstone-MacDonald pact in individual seats?

Might Roy Jenkins defecting to the Liberal Party before David Owen, Bill Rodgers, and Shirley Williams make their move lead to such a scenario?

Many people presumed in the early 1980s that the UK would eventually see a Conservative-SDP coalition government in that decade. Then the Falklands War happened and the Conservatives were given their largest majority in decades. A matter of dispute in the Alliance was who they would be willing to work with in a hung parliament, with the Liberals preferring Labour and the SDP the Conservatives.

In a scenario with no formal SDP-Liberal Alliance might we eventually see the development of a two and two halves party system in the UK, with governments either being the Conservatives supported or in coalition with the SDP or Lab-Lib coalitions or pacts.

Obviously there's a lot more to consider, but what if there was no formal SDP-Liberal Alliance in 1981?
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