The SDLP will resist pressure to get them to sign up to a rewriting of the Belfast Agreement, political opponents were warned tonight.
The SDLP leader, Mr Mark Durkan told a fringe event he was hosting at the Labour Party conference in Brighton the party had "stood firm" for the Agreement during recent negotiations at Leeds Castle in Kent and Stormont and would continue to do so.
The Foyle Assembly member said: "We want to add to it, improve it and develop it but we are not going to go along with anything that takes away any of its key features or principles.
"That is our reasonable, principled position. We make no apology for that," he said.
"Some seem to think that our role in these negotiations is to be pressurised to conform to the wishes or positions of others, to be the facilitators in the 'deal to end all deals'.
"These others include parties who have failed or defied the Agreement in different ways for their different reasons. Rather than choosing between them, we will stand by the people and the agreement they mandated.
"We will not succumb to anyone's assumptions - be they DUP, Sinn Fein, UUP, Alliance or either or both governments - that we will assist or support them in deviating from the Agreement's requirements."
With the parties deadlocked over the future of power sharing in the province, Mr Durkan noted the SDLP had been accused by the Democratic Unionists of being inflexible or intransigent.
He refuted these claims and said he wanted to make it clear to the DUP that if they worked with his party "on the basis of the Agreement and the real promise that it provides, then the SDLP will not be found wanting." However he accused the DUP of acting as if it had invented the issue of ministerial accountability in the power sharing executive.
The SDLP, he claimed, had put forward more proposals on improving accountability, efficiency and collectivity than any other party but the DUP had not bothered to respond to any of them.