Oddly enough I was discussing this with someone recently who had suggested that SF had no politics in the 1980s. I wouldn’t agree with that, from where I was still inside WP it was clear that from the early to the latter part of the decade that was becoming a greater and greater consideration and involvement in campaigns etc was increasing.
Geographically though, probably not so much, at least not in the areas where WP was strong. I figure as a rule of thumb from the start of trying to get a seat in a constituency to taking one is between seven and twelve years of effort which chimes with when SF really went big in the early 2000s in terms of getting more than Ferris’s seat. There was however a fair bit of activity on the ground by the early to mid 1990s around where I lived at at the time in the south west inner city.
I’ve often wondered did any from WP actually go over as members to SF during the 1990s.