THE REBEL MPS: ‘The odds are against us. But we’ve got to try’
As two major parties become three, Gaby Hinsliff unpicks what The Independent Group means for politics – and Brexit
IT’S NOT STRICTLY speaking a political party, you can’t vote for it yet, and it doesn’t even have any policies. But it’s already leapfrogged the Liberal Democrats in the polls, not to mention giving Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May a serious headache. And, unusually for a political movement, this one’s dominated by women.
We’re talking, of course, about The Independence Group ( TIG), the breakaway movement formed last week by (at the time of going to press) 11 Labour and Tory MPS quitting their parties to sit as independents. The Tiggers, as they’ve been dubbed, include a heavily pregnant Luciana Berger (below) – who blamed Labour’s failure to tackle anti-semitism for her departure – and pro-european Tories Anna Soubry and Sarah Wollaston, as well as former Labour leadership-hopeful Chuka Umunna. The idea is that they’ll seek common ground politically, building on cross-party friendships formed fighting a hard Brexit.
Although the Tiggers all back a ‘People’s Vote’ (a public vote on the final Brexit deal), they haven’t broken the Brexit deadlock overnight. With Britain officially due to leave the EU next month, there are still the same number of MPS for and against any plan for doing so, even if some have swapped parties.
But they have increased the pressure for a soft Brexit, with Corbyn facing more defections if he doesn’t agree to a second referendum, while May could lose MPS if she lets Britain leave with no deal – dangerous when her governing majority is now down to six, even with the DUP’S support.
One reason Westminster hasn’t seen a mass defection like this since the ’80s is that our electoral system makes it hard for new parties to break through in elections. ( The Tiggers say they won’t fight byelections as independents, since byelections can only be forced on them in specific circumstances – for instance, if a sitting MP goes to prison – and if they do eventually form a new party, that could take months.) But, as one ex-tory Tigger, Heidi Allen, put it: ‘ The odds are against us. But you know what? We’ve got to try.’