TOM CLARK
Absence, the post-modernists say, is just a special form of presence. The Independent Group (TIG) of MPs is so half-formed, so hazily-defined that it is more of a gap in the party system than anything else. In terms of ideas, its founding statement offered only negation, vowing its as yet unstated policies would be “not led by ideology.” The same document proposed to “fix our broken politics” but didn’t say how; two of the first eight Labour MPs involved, Angela Smith and Joan Ryan, had championed “No to AV” in 2011, when Nick Clegg was making similar noises in the name of changing the old voting system. One of the first Conservative members, Heidi Allen, almost immediately pledged to do nothing to bring down the May government, which—in conventional terms—would render this more of an adjunct to the Tories than an independent outfit. But who is to say whether she was speaking for a bloc of some sort, or only for herself?
Despite this long run of negatives, however, TIG could still be a something—or perhaps a non-thing—that proves to be the start of something big. Its arrival was followed within days by big shifts on Brexit policy on the part of both the government and the opposition front bench, and, in some circles at least, the excitement went wider too. Centrist Westminster commentators expressed a thrill at hearing centrist voices unleashed, and I know of temperamentally moderate voters hundreds of miles from Big Ben— the sort who regard compromise itself as a virtue—who also aired relief and enthusiasm about something being unjammed. The early polling suggested there might be quite a lot of them.