CSM EDITORIAL

Once Brexit is over, what do the so-called Independent Group have in common? How can Anna Soubry, who defended George Osborne’s austerity packages one after the other, sit in a new party – if that is what the TIG becomes – alongside profligate Labour MPs, whose default position is to drain dry the public coffers? Allen and Wollaston are oddballs and how they became Tories in the first place is a mystery – both of their embarrassed constituencies have no doubt learnt well from their errors for next time around.

The laughing trio’s talk of Purple Momentum taking over the Conservative Party is nonsense, and so is their chatter about the Prime Minister having an issue with immigration. They would do well to recall our first female Prime Minister and then wonder why on earth her party gave them a seat. They will say absolutely anything to reverse Brexit and they know full well that another few defections and it’s General Election time. They can expect in such circumstances to be drop-kicked into political oblivion, which is why Soubry has publicly declared she wants no more than a few further defections from the Conservative Party.

There’s something of toy-throwing babyness at play here. So hammered by Brexit are these quitters that they had no act of rebellion left in them except to desert. (Thank God they didn’t decide to quit in the nude. Dr Bateman terrorising Britons is one thing; Dr Wollaston joining her would be quite another).

The PM would lose the support of dozens of her own Brexiteer MPs were she to endorse a referendum. It’s best not to give the Tory trio any further airtime. They are one-trick ponies – die-hard People’s Vote promulgators – who will soon face the knacker’s yard.

The Labour quitters are also People’s Vote extremists too. However, their other reasons for leaving Labour – antisemitism chief among them – are sound. If they can begin to form a decent opposition from a centrist position, then they are doing the country a service. The current Labour Party has been hijacked by the Hard Left and does not merit a significant place in British Politics – like the SNP, it’s a dangerous counter culture behind which all the unsavoury movements hide; the IRA, the extremist Islamists and others who hate Britain and detest British success. The access that Corbyn’s Labour has already given these haters to public money will take Britain over a generation to recover from – we need to be circumspect and expose the hell out of them all.

The big problem which Labour TIG has – a problem it shares with the Liberal Democrats and Hard Left Labour – is leadership. Who of substance is there waiting in the wings who can lead it? The Conservative and Labour politicians who have jumped so far are lightweights except for Umunna and he’s not even middleweight – “Obama-lite” as he is well-known. Is that what Britain wants right now while embarking on a Post Brexit revival? A centrist blancmange of an opposition? Blairite soundbites? More Lib Dems? Or does this ragtag bunch simply seek to forever reverse Brexit? If the latter is the case then they are already irrelevant.

One suspects that the next few years will be unkind to TIG and they’ll disappear in a puff of nowt. Expect a raft of deselections and a reshaping of British politics in terms of safe candidate choices by the two main parties. There will be karma for TIG. In a British first-past-the-post system it’s loyalty – and sticking to the same old greasy poles – that tends to pay at elections.