Labour crisis deepens with more MPs ready to quit
Jeremy Corbyn faces a historic Labour rupture after being warned that more MPs are ready to follow the seven who dramatically quit his party yesterday.
The leader publicly appealed for unity while his supporters launched savage attacks on the MPs, branding them “cowards”, “traitors” and “splitters” and demanding they give up their seats.
But as the crisis deepened, deputy leader Tom Watson said other MPs are also considering leaving Labour, a party he admitted he sometimes no longer recognises, amid visceral anger over antisemitism, Brexit and Mr Corbyn’s leadership.
The breakaway MPs, headed by prominent backbenchers Chuka Umunna and Luciana Berger, said they would form a new “Independent Group” in the House of Commons and invited people from other parties to join.
There were some early signs yesterday evening that they might attract support from disenfranchised Conservatives to the new centre-ground anti-Brexit grouping in the chamber.
The group who left Labour, in the first major split of a British political party since the SDP were formed in 1981, also included Angela Smith, Gavin Shuker, Mike Gapes, Chris Leslie and Ann Coffey.
Shortly after the announcement, Mr Corbyn wrote to every party member expressing his disappointment that a “small group” had left and urged the party “must be united”.
But in a longer filmed statement, Mr Watson lamented their departure and in particular the antisemitic abuse suffered by Ms Berger that had preceded her announcement. He said: “Even a single incident of antisemitism in the Labour Party shames us. Now we have lost Luciana, one of our most dedicated and courageous MPs.
“If someone like Luciana no longer believes there is a home for her in the Labour Party then many other colleagues will be asking themselves how they can stay. That’s why time is short for us. To confront the scale of the problem and meet the consequences. To keep others from leaving.”
One source involved in the split told The Independent that other MPs were close to quitting and would follow depending on what happened over Brexit in the coming weeks.
In his statement, Mr Watson said that “a virulent form of identity politics has seized” control of Labour, and said Mr Corbyn’s team now must “reflect the balance of opinion” across all MPs in the parliamentary party. He also lashed out the “hard Left”, who he claimed “can be too easily tempted into the language of heresy and treachery”.
It came after the MPs faced a wave of abuse in the wake of their decision to leave, including fellow MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle who compared them to “cowards”. The Young Labour twitter account posted a line from the party’s anthem, The Red Flag, reading: “Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we’ll keep the red flag flying here.”
Shadow chancellor John McDonnell called on the breakaway group to do “the honourable thing” and fight to retain their seats, while Unite union boss Len McCluskey hit out at the “splitters” who had “no stomach for a fight for Labour’s core values”.
The decision to quit the party had been the result of months of soul searching for the MPs, with one telling The Independent: “I’ve been getting out of bed every morning for the past two years thinking, ‘Shall I resign from the Labour Party today or tomorrow?’”
The most recent Brexit votes on 14 February appear to have been a tipping point for some angered by Mr Corbyn’s reluctance to support a second referendum.
One source in the breakaway group said: “We were looking at the amendments that the Labour Party was putting down and hoping, I was hoping anyway, on the 14th we would have had a little more movement on a People’s Vote but in fact we ended up going backwards and it wasn’t referenced at all. Clearly a lot of us have had issues with the leadership of the party going back quite some time ... We tried everything to save the Labour Party.”
Mr Corbyn’s response to the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal also “crystallised” concerns, another MP said, arguing they were not prepared to sponsor a government led by him.
As she resigned, Ms Berger said Labour had become “institutionally antisemitic”, while Mr Gapes, a
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