Why did Change UK end up splitting? Well, there were the personality clashes. And then there was the failure to attract more MPs who were supposed to break off from their existing parties to join the quest to change politics. But the biggest reason the party ended up in this mess was that simply it became a party.
When it started off as the Independent Group, its members seemed keen to cast their new caucus as something loose and exploratory, rather than a formal political party. In fact, I understand that three of the MPs – Gavin Shuker, Angela Smith and Luciana Berger – who announced they were leaving today were very resistant to the idea that the group should register as a political party. But in the end they were overruled, particularly by Chris Leslie. As a compromise, the group agreed to elect an interim leader rather than a permanent one, but the choice of Allen led to clashes with her former Conservative colleague Soubry, who felt she had insufficient experience to be heading up a party.
The problem with creating a political party is that you need to have some unity around your values. If you’re in an existing, longstanding one, you can be forgiven for taking a different view of what Conservatism is to another one of your 300 or so colleagues. Not so much if there are just 11 of you and you’re trying to articulate what it is exactly that you want to change about politics. Parties are hard to control, rather like large buses with no brakes (and, in Change UK’s case, a terrible logo on the side), and they require a whole other level of administration to a loose grouping of independents.
What united the MPs was merely that they wanted to leave their existing parties. They hadn’t had time to work out what they stood for from now on, how they wanted to change politics, and whether they really could work with the people who they’d ended up next to in the lifeboats. Creating a political party forced them to come together before they’d worked any of this out.
There were also tensions over the way some members made unilateral declarations about who could join and who couldn’t. Chuka Umunna announcing that Nick Boles couldn’t join because he didn’t want electoral reform irritated a number of the other MPs, who felt that firstly electoral reform was probably not the hill the party should die on, and secondly that it didn’t have the luxury of ruling out obviously able and energetic potential members. As it happens, I understand that Boles wasn’t a massive fan of a party which featured Umunna so prominently anyway. It was this and Boles’ opposition to the party’s commitment to a second referendum that played a factor in his decision to go solo when he quit the Tories.
So what should the New Independent Group do now? It’s likely that at least Umunna will join the Liberal Democrats, but other MPs are keen to go back to the loose grouping of independents who can work across parties in a flexible fashion. If nothing else, it seems odd to bang on about how broken politics is, only to announce that you’re going to fix it by joining an existing party. They are still hopeful that they might attract more MPs to join them – as are the remaining Change UK members. But for the time being, any new splitters won’t have to choose between Change UK and yet another new political party. If nothing else, it spares British politics from having to cope with yet another poorly-designed logo.
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