This is not a new centre party: it’s a club for old-fashioned Remainers

The Independent Group’s ideological Blairism isn’t the cure for our ills, but a fresh dose of the disease

Ihave tremendous admiration and respect for the seven MPS who quit Labour yesterday: it took real courage and they’re right about the danger posed to democracy by mob politics and anti-semitism. But aside from hating Jeremy Corbyn, what unites the new Independent Group? Brexit. What explains their timing? Brexit. What do they want to do? Stop Brexit. This is a Remainer party. Worse, it’s a party that confuses its outdated Europhilia for moderation. No one is 100 per cent sure where the centre ground is, but it’s probably closer to Sunderland than Brussels.

If the overriding motivation for leaving Labour was anti-semitism, the magnificent seven could have ridden off into the sunset months ago. No, what’s forced their hand is that it’s only 38 days till Brexit and Mr Corbyn won’t endorse a second referendum, and the lack of Labour Leaver MPS such as Kate Hoey shows that this probably won’t be a “big tent” project. The Independent Group is pitched at a very specific demographic that fancies itself as the salvation of an untapped silent majority.

Two figures will tempt more people to throw time and money at the Independent Group. First, the 48 per cent who voted Remain and who are supposedly under-represented in Parliament. Second, a recent Opinium poll that found 59 per cent of Britons would consider voting for “a new centre-ground party” at the next general election, which sounds clear enough until you download the spreadsheet and dig into the figures. Eighty-six per cent of Lib Dems say they fancy a centrist alternative (which is embarrassing for a self-styled centrist party), but so do 73 per cent of Ukippers. And just as 59 per cent of Remain voters are interested, so too are 61 per cent of Leavers.

There’s the rub. Everyone calls themselves a centrist – from the militant socialist to the medieval Tory – because everyone thinks the centre ground is exactly where they stand. But the reality is that the centre as a precise midway point in overall public opinion shifts from Left to Right, year to year, issue by issue.

For instance, one would have thought the right-down-the-middle, mathematically calculated approach to Brexit would be Labour’s current policy of leaving the EU but remaining in a customs union. So why isn’t that good enough for the Independent seven? Because they’re not about compromise or getting “the best Brexit”. They’re not centrists in the sense of cynical triangulators (that much was clear from the emotional, rather moving speeches they gave explaining their resignations), but Europhiles of principle and keepers of the Blairite flame. In other words, ideologues who – as we all do – conflate their own values with those of everyone else. A bit like the old buffer who, when told Labour had won in 1945, famously exclaimed: “My God, the country will never stand for it!”

The philosophy is there in their “statement of independence”, which reads like a New Labour mix tape. The Independent Group wants “improved life chances”, a “mixed social market economy”, “safeguarding the vulnerable”, “a multilateral, international rules-based order”, and a partridge in a pear tree! If it sounds like vague nonsense, that’s partly to keep it neutral enough to attract Tory Remainers, but also because vague nonsense was the language of the Blair years, which time has shown could be surprisingly radical.

Its ethos permeated schools, the police, the social services and even the Conservative Party, which is why David Cameron was really Blair Part II. It promised economic and social liberalism: with one hand, it privatised and flattered the rich, with the other, it made everyone feel better about themselves by being kind to an entire alphabet of sexual identities. Europe was super; immigration was smashing. If you didn’t agree, well, you were just a bit racist.

This isn’t “centrism”, it’s the political agenda of a powerful cultural perspective (largely London’s) and its vice-like grip on politics for nearly two decades alienated millions. Antipathy towards this agenda won Corbyn the leadership in 2015, and helped Leave to win the Brexit referendum. In short, the Independent Group isn’t offering a cure for the country’s political ills; it is prescribing a fresh dose of the disease.

A caveat: some of the seven are from outside London and have strong roots in working-class politics. But why haven’t they registered popular anger at the delay of Brexit, or exhaustion with liberal platitudes in a country that is ripe for genuine change? Gloria de Piero, who hasn’t left Labour, recently wrote a fascinating account of her journey from London journalist to Nottinghamshire MP, where she discovered an entirely different set of priorities from those in the capital. Interrogating local opinion post-brexit, she found frustration at poverty and a desire for more state help, but also fears that immigration will drive down wages. Brexit had its supporters. Julie, 43, a mother of three, said it’s not just about trade but identity and respect. Mark, 52, who voted for the first time in the referendum, added: “Democracy is very important. Sovereignty is very important. The history of this country is very important.”

One suspects that if there is a centre ground, it isn’t London’s formula of economic and social liberalism but the very opposite. It’s tax-and-spend plus defence, law-and-order and patriotism – what is generally known, and dismissed with a sneer, as populism. If Remainers are missing a home then so, too, are the populists that they (inaccurately) claim call the shots in Brexit Britain. In reality, the Tories might be on board with leaving the EU, but their economic policies favour the rich and their social policy is wet, wet, wet. Labour might be on the side of the poor, but it comes across as unpatriotic and a wee bit odd.

The great tradition that’s being denied a voice in politics is what some call Blue Labour, a common-sense, parochial socialism that it’s now hard to fathom ever existed. Can you believe that Hugh Gaitskell once called membership of the Common Market the death of British independence, “the end of a thousand years of history”? A breakaway Labour group that said something along those lines truly would be a surprise, and a welcome one at that.