Last Spasm of the Centrists

The Usual Suspects: the Seven Centrists of Neoliberalism  (photo - Guardian newspaper)

"What has happened to the Labour Party is a symptom of the dysfunctional state of British politics - it shows why fundamental change is so badly needed. It is time to build an alternative."

Bold words from Chukka Umunna as he announced the departure of himself and six other Labour MPs from the party to sit as the Independent Group. Politics is broken, asserted one of them, the hitherto unheard of Mike Gapes, MP for Ilford South, whose Twitter handle shows him relaxing in his straw hat - perhaps illustrating this whole exercise as a "strawman", hoping to peel off more right wing Labour parliamentarians and members. And, it seems, a few Tories too according to Mr Gapes. Bedfellows all.

Keeping coy about their intentions about forming a new party, they have set up a website to invite supporters to register. It seems a deliberate echo of the now distant time when social democrats split from Labour to set up the SDP in 1981, for a brief interlude beforehand setting up the Council for Social Democracy. That party briefly flew high before sinking under the ego of its second leader, Dr David Owen, and then vanishing into the merged Liberal Democrats in 1988.

The world shakes: the prominent MP Mr Gapes resigns from Labour

But this time, what prospects for the Independents?

Well, few could doubt that politics is broken - not only over Brexit (indeed, that is itself a symptom rather than a cause of the current temporal rift in British politics) - but over a society that is broken. And why is it broken?

Perhaps it has something to do with the last 40 years of "neoliberalism", the ideology promoted by Thatcher and happily adopted by Blair and his cronies - Umunna and Chris Leslie, another of today's defectors, among them. These seven dwarves of centrism - these are the people who happily sold off chunks of the NHS, privatised swathes of welfare, introduced student fees, and leeched out tens of billions in taxpayer funds to ludicrously expensive Public-Private "partnerships", a misonomer of a relationship akin to the type that a tapeworm has with a bowel. These are the people who gladly took us to war in Iraq and blew their own fuses when Miliband and Corbyn opposed bombing Syria. These are the people who were "intensely relaxed" about the filthy rich becoming even dirtier.

These are the people on whose watch Britain, the fourth or fifth richest country in the world, became one of the most unequal, a land where the equivalent of the population of a medium sized town sleep in shop doorways and under bridges every night of the year.

So they are not the harbingers of a new politics, these Balirite hasbeens and never-weres. Rather, this little parade of the Usual Suspects this morning seems more like the final spasms of the centrists, akin to a headless chicken still runing around for a frenzied few, final moments. Neoliberalism re-animated, a true Frankenstein for our times. Stitched together, stitched up and, as people turn for new answers to the problems they created, out of ideas and out of time.

Unlike the Seven Centrists, the SDP only had a gang of four, but at least they had a name: tellingly, Umunna & Co haven't adopted a name - "Independent" is meaningless, though to be fair, "neoliberal" is probably too obscure.

So what could they use?
Hang on - how about "New Labour"?! That should do the trick...

The Social Democrats 1981 - at least they had a name!