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Plots and plans for a new centrist party to occupy the vacant middle ground of British politics have been bubbling away in secret meetings and WhatsApp discussions for years. Yesterday, one of those groups finally broke cover, as a group of seven MPs announced their resignation from Labour, citing frustrations with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

Although rumours about such a schism have been rumbling for months, the machinery behind The Independent Group only kicked into action in the last few weeks. Its website was only registered on Sunday, February 10. The site crashed throughout Monday, supposedly as a result of high public demand for information (although this is a tried and tested PR tactic).


The website states that the Independent Group is supported by Gemini A Ltd, a company that was formed on January 16, 2019, with Gavin Shuker MP – one of the defectors – as its sole director. Its registered address, in Altrincham, Cheshire, is directly above the The Unicorn pub.

More MPs from both sides of the House could join the group – the political blog Guido Fawkes lists an additional three Labour and two Tory MPs it believes have a high likelihood of defecting.

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But despite the media coverage and attention garnered yesterday, it remains unclear what the group’s policies will be, and how they might vote differently to moderate Labour MPs or the Liberal Democrats in the five weeks before B-Day.

Of course it looks bad for Labour and Corbyn, but in terms of its actual impact, there are a number of reasons why this grouping could prove no more consequential than the WhatsApp group it likely emerged from.


Unclear policies

This is not a new political party – at least not yet. That means there’s no leader, and no manifesto. There is, however, a vague ‘statement of independence,’ on the group’s website, which emphasises commitments to a “diverse, mixed social market economy,” and a belief in “international rules-based order”.

On Brexit, they promise a “strong and coherent alternative to the Conservatives’ approach,” but it’s not clear how the MPs in this breakaway group will vote on key issues, or even whether they’ll all vote the same way. Their antipathy towards Corbyn and the Labour leadership is not new, so it’s impossible to say whether they’ll vote any differently now to how they would have if they’d still been in the party.

They have only rebelled and voted the opposite way to the bulk of the Labour Party on a handful of occasions in this Parliament, and not in unison. There are also clear overlaps in aims with the Liberal Democrats, whose leader Sir Vince Cable has said he’s open to working with the Independent Group.

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Lack of heavyweights

The news has echoes of a similar division in the 1980s, when the ‘Gang of Four’ split from an increasingly left-wing (and anti-EEC) Labour party to form the Social Democratic Party, which would eventually become part of the Liberal Democrats. At the following election, Labour’s share of the vote collapsed from 36.9 percent to 27.6 percent, with the SDP-Liberal alliance picking up 25.4 percent (but only winning 23 seats to Labour’s 209).


But the four who split from Labour back then were significant figures in the party - all of them had served as secretaries of state under previous Labour governments, and Roy Jenkins had previously been Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Deputy Leader of the Party. In contrast, few of the seven Independent Group MPs are widely known - only Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger, and Chris Leslie appear in a YouGov ranking of the UK’s most famous politicians, where they are the 20th, 56th and 81st most popular Labour figures.

Limited electoral impact

Three of the seven MPs were unlikely to contest the next election for Labour anyway - Chris Leslie and Gavin Shuker had already lost votes of no confidence in their local constituency parties, and moves have been made to deselect Luciana Berger too. The majority are in safe Labour seats where they might struggle to compete with the electoral machinery of the bigger party if they ran as independents.

Angela Smith is the only one of the seven with a majority of less than 10,000, and Labour could conceivably lose her seat of Penistone and Stocksbridge at the next election if she runs as an independent and splits the vote. Of course, for that to happen the group will have to register as a political party first. Then, as the group have said they won’t be holding by-elections in their seats, there will have to be a general election.

Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, criticised the group as a distraction in a Facebook post. She wrote: “The only thing that anyone should do in response to the action of these MPs today is to respectfully and politely ask them a simple question: Do they intend to put up candidates in Labour-Tory marginals, and split the Labour vote?”

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That could have a more significant impact - akin to what happened in the 1980s with the breakaway of the SDP. According to electoralcalculus.co.uk, a two percent swing from Labour to a splinter group would lead to a 12-seat Conservative majority at a general election, based on the 2017 results.

But, under the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, the next general election isn’t due to take place until 2022. Of course, there could well be one before that, but what happens with Brexit (and potential boundary changes) could completely change the equation for these seven MPs, and everyone else.

What does it all mean?

The formation of The Independent Group is indicative of a trend that has been brewing for decades. More and more, people’s diverse views are simply not reflected by the two major parties. “It’s a symptom of what we’ve been trying to do with our politics,” says Darren Hughes, the chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society. “The last few years have really demonstrated that these issues run much deeper than a blue team and a red team. Society has fundamentally changed and Brexit has drawn back the curtains.”

“Yesterday reminds us that both major parties are essentially coalitions, but the voters have no control over which faction is going to be in charge of the party,” he says. Until yesterday, both the Conservatives and Labour managed to keep the dissenting groups and WhatsApp insurgencies broadly in line, but now the cracks are getting bigger. And there are 37 days to go.

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