The ball is now in Jeremy Corbyn’s court. Whether the new “Independent Group” of MPs that split from the Labour party on Monday takes off largely depends upon what the leader does now to address the three crisis issues dividing him from the mainstream in his party: Europe, antisemitism and the attempted mass deselection of Labour MPs.
The group, if it coalesces into a party of some kind, will struggle in the unforgiving world of our first-past-the-post electoral system. The SDP, of which I was an enthusiastic founder member shortly after my 18th birthday because of my admiration for Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams, is not an encouraging precedent. The SDP got to 25% of the vote in alliance with the Liberals in the 1983 election, but the two parties combined won only 23 seats and most of the 28 Labour MPs who defected to it lost their seats. Significantly for the Independent Group, far more Labour MPs lost their seats from joining the SDP than from deselection at the hands of far left activists.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2BI4jcU
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