Westminster has a new parlour game. Since Monday, a conversation with anyone in or around politics will open with a round of “So what are the chances for this new Independent Group?” Players are encouraged to produce ever smarter reasons why the cluster of 11 MPs who broke from their former parties – eight from Labour, three from the Tories – is doomed to fail. Bonus points are awarded for historical references or imaginative use of polling data. By way of a warm-up, there are the obvious early arguments. New or third parties do notoriously badly under our first-past-the-post electoral system: just look at the SDP. There are no heavyweight figures to match the Gang of Four, who broke from Labour in 1981. The Independents have no leader and no clear policy stance.
What’s more, within three hours of launching they were playing defence after one of their number, Angela Smith, seemingly referred to black and minority ethnic people as having a “funny tinge”, a racism so crude it was bewildering. Notice too how they struggle to surmount the contradiction of demanding a people’s vote on Brexit while refusing a people’s vote on themselves by refusing to trigger byelections in their own seats.
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