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The odds are against them, but these MPs could yet change our politics

Independent MPs in the House of Commons during prime minister’s questions 20 February 2019.
Independent MPs in the House of Commons during prime minister’s questions 20 February 2019. Photograph: Jessica Taylor/AFP/Getty Images

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 Bonus points are awarded for historical references or imaginative use of polling data.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.

Next, players of the game move on to strategy. The focus on Brexit is a mistake, they’ll say, because it will leave the group with no raison d’etre once the Brexit deal is done and because it prevents leave-minded MPs from joining. Witness Ian Austin’s move today, breaking from Labour but refusing to sit with the TIGgers because they want a second referendum while he is a backer of Theresa May’s deal.

Indeed, the Independents may well have located the wrong gap in the political market. Politics professor Matthew Goodwin makes a cogent case that there’s a big, Blue-Labour-shaped pool of voters who tilt left on the economy but right on questions of migration and Europe. TIG’s pro-European, socially liberal vibe might play well in “Oxford, Cambridge and London”, says Goodwin, but won’t travel much beyond.

That nods to the analysis you get from those who formed the last Labour breakaway, nearly four decades ago. One of that founding quartet, David Owen, likes to say that the SDP’s great error was in locating itself on the nebulous centre ground, pulled there by Roy Jenkins, rather than identifying itself unambiguously as a party of the left. The strategy should have been nothing less than “replacement” of Michael Foot’s Labour party: given the brute logic of our two-party system, that’s the only way it could ever have hoped to succeed.

Bill Rodgers, David Owen, Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams
The SDP ‘gang of four’ Bill Rodgers, David Owen, Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams. Photograph: PA

I heard something similar this week from more than one senior Labour figure, opposed to Jeremy Corbyn but unimpressed by this new venture. They argued that the only breakaway that could work would be one led by scores of Labour MPs who would then claim that they, rather than the current Corbyn-led operation, were the real Labour party. That group could then fight over who were the true heirs of Labour tradition, taking the battle to both the progressive cities and more Blue Labour-ish industrial towns. (There seemed to be a hint of such a project in Tom Watson’s video statement regretting the departure of the initial Independent seven. Labour’s deputy leader did not condemn their move as wrong, only “premature”.) As it is, according to those senior figures, the Independents will merely compete with Labour, along with the Lib Dems and the Greens, for the votes of liberal graduates living in big cities. They might do well in that contest, but it is not a path to power.

That the Independents are tilting towards Jenkins rather than Owen, and eschewing the replacement strategy, became clear on Wednesday when they opened their arms to three former Conservative MPs – including, in Anna Soubry, one unrepentant about the George Osborne era of austerity. Her presence hardly suggests an effort to replace Labour as Britain’s main party of the left. The more Tory defectors move over, convinced their party has been taken over by the hard right – as they surely will if the planned defenestration of May after the local elections, reported in tonight’s Guardian, comes to fruition – the further from Labour, and Labour voters, the Independents will be.

See, it’s a fun game, isn’t it? There are endless ways to write off this effort, to chart the many routes that will take it to failure. And yet, none of them convinces fully. Despite everything, the possibility remains that this move by a handful of MPs could amount to something, even something big.

For a start, it depends how you define success. If the only measure is parliamentary seats, then yes, the SDP failed. But it did succeed in reshaping British politics, halting Labour’s drift leftward and prompting Neil Kinnock’s slow, Herculean effort to pull the party back to electoral viability. In the end, Owen’s replacement strategy prevailed. The Labour party was replaced eventually – not by the SDP, but by New Labour. And to those who still doubt a grouping with next to no MPs can have an impact on Britain’s destiny, there is a more recent, one-word reply: Ukip.

Besides, all this analysis – citing precedents from the 1980s and long-established tribal voting patterns – draws from a playbook of British politics that has been visibly shredded in the last three and a half years. No precedent suggested Jeremy Corbyn could be elected Labour leader, just as the past was no guide to the election of 2017. It could be that the Independents are about to turn conventional wisdom upside down once more.

So while the playbook says a new party, if that’s what the TIGgers become, needs a detailed policy platform, it’s surely possible that the opposite is true: that this grouping could benefit from its very vagueness, becoming a blank screen on which disenchanted voters, looking for something new, project their hopes. When asked about the contradictory views of its members, Independent MPs can shake their heads at their interviewers and say, “You still don’t get it.” They can say that, like normal people, they disagree on things; that it’s the old notion that everyone should follow a party line set by a leader that’s weird and hopelessly out of date. They can play the insurgents – representing a new politics, challenging a decaying binary system in which both May and Corbyn are equally embedded.

That gives them an edge, which they are already enjoying. The striking feature of both breakaway press conferences was hearing politicians saying what they actually think, often with great force, rather than parroting a party line or weighing each word for its internal positioning. It’s this that explains the smiling relief on the faces of those who have moved.

Voters will pick up on that because it speaks to something true. Even if their remedy is uncertain, the Independents’ diagnosis is hard to dispute. Both main parties are bent on implementing, or enabling, a policy that will be disastrous for this country. One party is in thrall to xenophobes and nativists; the other has shown no sign that it understands, let alone can deal with, the particular brand of anti-Jewish racism that flourishes, and is flourishing, on the left – and which saw Luciana Berger face a daily onslaught of abuse alone, without her party leader so much as speaking to her since 2017.

Many have spent months lamenting this state of affairs. Now a small group of people have decided they can abide this paralysis no longer, that they have to act. You can dispute the wisdom of their action, you can bet that it won’t work. But in a room that had grown stale and fetid, their refusal to do nothing is a blast of fresh air.

• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist