Breaking the spell: the Independent Group

So it’s finally happened. We have a splinter group, and it’s growing. British politics has entered a whirlwind of panicked opinion. Sure, we’ve had hard-left Labour factions, antisemitism and the ERG has acquired an apparently iron grip on the Conservative tiller, but this is the first time any MPs have actually left a party as a consequence of Brexit. Are they angels? Demons? Do they represent the end of the world as we know it? Will they have any effect at all on the stoney edifices of Corbyn and May?

Something doesn’t ring true, however, about this simple act of leaving, even as a group, being sufficient cause for this weight of response. Such an act is undeniably bad for publicity and for parliamentary influence, but alone it doesn’t account for the distinctly existential quality of the issue. Hundreds of MPs have crossed the floor in the last century alone. So the big question is: what, if anything, is significant about this development? Is it the first sign of a giant crack splitting open in the political landscape, or will it just fizzle out? What significance is there that the group has emerged as independents and not as a party? What does it have to say about what will happen, and about the state of British politics?

The answer, it seems, is a lot.

British politics has an image of being stable. Watch foreigners, EU or otherwise, describe their reaction to Brexit and the reaction is almost unanimous: they can’t believe such a catastrophe has happened here, at the home of parliamentary politics. For all Britain’s meddling, it retains significant respect in the international community. In many ways, they’re right. Despite its ills, the First Past the Post (FPTP) system does lead to long periods of governmental stability and present a huge challenge to new groups hoping to enter power. Both UKIP and the SDP had enough of a vote share to land them more seats than they ever actually received. FPTP also encourages those parties in power to listen to the pressures represented by fringe groups by acting as a buffer between the emergence of those groups and their actual parliamentary presence. Our governments are usually single-party and last a good ten to fifteen years at the top of power. How, then, could such a trainwreck occur in our midst – and so suddenly?

The answer is that, for all its stability, British politics has had significant upsets in the past – sometimes bigger than Brexit. It’s simply that these upsets are not matched by the flow of Proportional Representation. Instead, when FPTP parties split, the pressure has been building for a while and that split is a much more significant statement. It means that, in a system where only two parties are actually vehicles to effective power, one or both of those parties has failed to be responsible in its execution and become unbalanced. In current times, that step has been taken by the Independent Group. In the last hundred or so years, three previous instances come to mind: the departure of Conservative MPs to join UKIP, the “Gang of Four” who formed the Social Democratic Party in 1981 and the Conservative split over Tariff Reform in the 1906 General Election.

Despite the UKIP defections being apparently the most similar and certainly the most recent, there is little to say about them. As only two MPs defected, they were more symbolic of UKIP’s leverage over the Conservative vote than representative of an imminent threat to the Conservatives’ existence in Parliament. The defections of Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless are most useful as being indicative of the Conservative divide which later became Brexit, but they only represented a few MPs. Due to the First Past the Post electoral system, UKIP failed to get enough seats in Parliament. Their relevance to a Parliamentary split, then, is limited. UKIP have, it’s fair to say, made their mark in British politics, but they did so largely outside British politics and by scaring the Conservative party into appeasing their demands. UKIP never had many seats in Parliament itself.

The new Brexit Party, launched by Nigel Farage to not much fanfare, is likely to suffer the same fate. It exists to replace the UKIP which has now moved further to the right than even Farage is comfortable with. Yet, like UKIP, it has no actual seats in Parliament (apart from Brexiteers). Unlike UKIP, it is so far without significance. The power of UKIP was in its ‘stick it to ’em’ attitude rather than its actual policies and in its leverage over the Conservatives. The current UKIP has taken the edge on the attitude, and the Conservatives have succeeded in taking on Farage’s main policies, making the announcement of a Brexit party left of UKIP decidedly, astonishingly redundant. Until his Brexit Party wins either seats or influence, Farage may have found himself unwittingly left in the dust of the movement he created.

The Social Democratic Party’s formation between January and March 1981 has a reasonable amount of similarity with today’s Independent Group. Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers emerged as the “Gang of Four” from a Labour Party which was veering to the hard Left, identified as a centrist group and were born of a need to rebalance Opposition politics. Twenty-eight MPs eventually joined them and they won a significant share of the vote, but not enough to actually win enough seats in this electoral system. Then, as now, parties were moving away from the centre. The difference in the SDP’s case was that Margaret Thatcher managed to take the centre ground with her to the Right, making the SDP squarely a Labour problem. Only one Conservative MP joined; more of a personal choice than a wider trend. Today, this is seen more as a rebalancing of party politics than a revolution. It wasn’t even a death knell for the Labour party, which has survived long enough to have the same issue thirty-eight years later.

The Conservative split, and the Liberal Party split which followed it, is the most significant comparison and the clearest Brexit parallel. It’s a much bigger issue than there is space for in this article, though this article does a wonderful job of explaining it and the basic information can be found here. Essentially, the Conservative party had been dominant at the 1900 General Election, but pressures on living conditions similar to those under Brexit were rearing their heads. It call came to a head in the Tariff Reform debate, Free Trade versus Protectionism, spearheaded by a Nigel Farage-esque Joseph Chamberlain. Chamberlain left the Conservatives to do so, splitting it in the process. Featuring slogans such as “Tariff Reform means work for all”, Chamberlain’s passionate advocacy of Protectionism as a right-wing solution to the pressures on the masses and the Conservative Party’s increasing blame for a series of increasingly unpopular policies lost the Conservative Party around 240 seats at the 1906 General Election, including that of the party leader.

After this catastrophic loss, an overconfident, overblown Conservative party refused to acknowledge defeat and blockaded politics through the Lords. It’s a big part of why the Lords can’t block a bill indefinitely these days. The Conservatives would return, however, during World War I. Always much more suited as the party of war, they returned first as a Liberal-Conservative coalition, then enjoyed a long streak in power after the Liberals collapsed due to compounding pressures. In short, Tariff Reform was devastating for the Conservative Party, but it was far from the end. As for Nigel Farage, Tariff Reform represented the final issue for Joseph Chamberlain, though this may have been due in part to old age and a stroke which hindered his ability to act politically. Chamberlain’s influence on the Conservatives’ image, however, was long-lasting.

The Independent Group may seem to threaten the complete demise of the British political system as we know it – it’s certainly a much more serious in being a cross-party defection – but the Conservative split in 1906 shows it’s not necessarily the end of the world. British politics may well survive, emerging more strongly with a functional Left-wing. The primary difference is the cross-party nature of the split. Several defections have already come from both sides and more are threatened to follow. Unlike the SDP and the 1906 split, this affects more than one major party. Antisemitism is a Labour issue, but Brexit is a crisis issue for both major parties. If anything, Brexit (and European organisation more broadly) has, like Tariff Reform, been the ticking time bomb of the Conservative party for decades, far before Margaret Thatcher condemned a federated Europe. The Independent Group, then, doesn’t threaten the demise of British politics as a whole. It may well represent its survival. It does, however, threaten the basis of both major parties, especially in the short term. With enough of a defection from both sides, they would be well-placed to stand for election themselves.

The Independent Group, however, represent more than this reorganisation of the major parties. Rumblings are emerging that the tribal system at Westminster is changing. Party loyalties no longer mean as much, with increasing numbers of MPs speaking for themselves and forming sub-factions within the ranks. It used to be that you could expect MPs to follow the party line in the media. Now, they are just as strategic with their word choices, but for their own reasons, not under the instructions of their Party Whip. This has been most clear with the Brexiteers and the ERG, who have felt so free with their words that they are practically their own party. I’ve heard it said that MPs can’t imagine going back to the previous ways of doing politics, even if Brexit were not to happen.

Famously, in the Westminster cafeteria, parties would sit only with each other. More recently, it has been said that MPs from different parties have been mingling, finding more in common with each other than they expected. These MPs are forming their own sub-factions to tackle issues of the day where current party options do not suffice: the ERG; people’s vote supporters; soft Brexiters. With such ineffectual, powerless party leaders at a time of national crisis, MPs are finally turning to alternative strategies. The Independent Group, then, may well represent the emergence of this new norm of more individualised MPs and smaller party groups emerging into the daylight. Whilst the ERG continues to skulk under the wings of the Conservative banner, where they can have the most influence, those who have been expelled from the nest are no longer afraid to fly alone.

The behaviour of the Independent Group themselves has been rather quiet and understated. Changing where they sit; not asking questions at PMQs; holding two short press conferences, one for each group who defected. Not least, emerging as independents, rather than a Party, per se. Why haven’t they just come out as the Soft Brexit Party? The answer is that they don’t need to speak to have an impact: their actions are loud enough on their own. The very fact of their existence is the most powerful thing about them. Each step they take echoes deafeningly through the halls of Parliament. In defecting, the Independent Group have broken the spell which has hung over the Commons: the question that, with such deteriorating conditions, what can – what will – anyone do? Will this grow to threaten the integrity of the major parties themselves? Will Parliament reshape to reflect the Brexit crisis? The emergence of the Independent Group has answered that question.  The door is now open for MPs to create a true Opposition. It must be opened carefully, lest the opportunity be wasted.

This, then, is the big question underlying reactions to the Independent Group: what do they mean for Brexit, and for British politics? Given that both parties are liable to be mortally wounded by Brexit from both sides (whatever they go by at this point), will either survive? Will we even have them to vote for in a few years’ time? Well, it’s difficult to say. British politics is afflicted by a severe political strain of Dutch disease: where an economy can become fatally tied to one product, British politics is fatally tied to one issue. One or both of the major parties could very well go down with the ship, but they don’t tend to.

After 1906, the Conservatives eventually reformed during World War I and again became the leading party of government. After the SDP split in 1981, Labour re-emerged under Tony Blair as New Labour in 1997. Even the Liberals are still hanging on after their utter decimation over the war effort, though they faced the added pressure of replacement on the Left and as the Second Party of Government by the Labour Party. In the case of the Independent Group, we cannot know whether the Independent Group will end up as another SDP or as a 1906 crisis on a cross-party scale until we see whether there are further defections over the coming weeks and months. What we can know is that changes this big usually have some measure of historic impact on British parliamentary politics. They are a reflection of their times. After a period in exile, it’s most likely that any injured Parties will re-emerge stronger and more suited to again handling the reigns of power.

In the end, the answer to why the Independent Group feels like an sea change to British politics is because it is. It’s been clear to everyone, whatever their position, that British politics has been decidedly and obviously unbalanced for some time. Ever since the hard Brexiteers took over British politics, right back to the 2016 Referendum and the 2017 General Election when the 52% became the gospel word, Britain has been like a car on two wheels instead of four. We’ve all heard from Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Nigel Farage, UKIP and the rest of the Brexiteers. We’ve heard scattered voices from the alternative. But good debate, and British politics, is based on having one position in Government and one in Opposition; on PMQs and Shadow Ministers. Until now, we have had no true, coordinated Opposition. It is not illegitimate for both sides of the debate to have a fair shot at arguing their case. Whatever our individual preferred outcomes, it’s in our best interests to have it interrogated properly. Arguments have, thus far, been made by the Brexiteers, but no functional, coordinated response has yet existed.

The emergence of the Independent Group is that pressure being released; the system righting itself and coming back into balance. Whether the individual MPs end up as martyrs and rebalance the major parties or whether they draw MPs from those lopsided giants into a whole new Centrist group really doesn’t matter. What matters is that for the first time since UKIP began to exert pressure on the tiller of Conservative politics, and the ERG after them, we have a true counterpoint in the British political landscape. In doing so, the precedent has been set that the answer to where British politics would go is not a confirmation of the hard right, but a rebalancing, Centrist alternative. The Independent Group have established, after almost three years, a legitimate bastion from which the other half of the debate can be argued. They don’t have to be the ultimate answer. They’ve just finally set the goal posts of what it means to debate Brexit in British parliamentary politics.