FORMER Labour MP Angela Smith told Sky News that the new Independent Group must be a “bottoms up” movement.

It was another foot-in-mouth moment for Smith, who previously blurted out a racist burble about minorities having a “funny tinge.” 

It is a strange illustration that a political group promoting individuals over policy has some of Westminster’s least impressive individuals up front. It also points to the big contradiction of the Independent Group. 

Smith means the “new politics” should be a grassroots, bottom-up thing, not that it should be a let’s-get-drunk bottoms up affair. But the Independent Group could not be more top-down. 

Chuka Umunna showed the same self-deception. Umunna told reporters: “You can’t have this cooked up by seven people in Westminster. If we just do things the same old way and announce things at podiums and tell people how it’s going to be then we are just behaving like the Establishment and we want to be different.”

He actually made this announcement at a podium, as he told people how he wanted things to be. The “Independent Group” is unconvincingly trying on “anti-Establishment” clothing while wearing their best Westminster suits under the fancy dress. 

The Independent Group is so “top-down” that it is a party with only seven members. Unless you are an MP, you can’t join, you can only offer support or money. 

Frustrated at their attempt to convince anyone in their party to support them, they have abolished the membership. 

Chris Leslie doubled down on the we-talk-you-listen approach, telling the New Statesman that “everybody has genuflected to membership” but they shouldn’t listen to the rank and file because “that membership is a tiny fraction of the public at large.” 

Unable to convince the tiny fraction of 500,000 Labour members, Leslie won’t listen to the public either, because he won’t put his new group to by-elections. 

The Independent Group is independent of the public, and of party members. They are the Westminster Bubble Manifesto. 

They can get by on a very favourable press for a long time. The Tory press will give them room as long as they mostly disrupt the Labour Party. Leading “liberal” journalists love them because they also love New Labour and “Cameroon” politics, which are all about having a little social conscience and a large second house and public school fees.

But ultimately they will have to step out the bubble, or their own bubble will pop. The Independent Group is much shallower than the 1980s Social Democrat Party (SDP) breakaway from Labour. 

The SDP tried hard to recruit a new rank and file, to have public excitement rather than just Westminster manoeuvres. It made it much more convincing.

The second weakness is their politics: Umunna said the new group was needed because “politics is broken.” The long years of austerity have indeed weakened faith in “Establishment” politics. 

But they have mostly weakened faith in the established politics that Umunna offers. New Labour was a mix. It offered new social spending — on hospitals, schools, welfare — but only by market means, through PFI or managed bullying workfare firms like Atos. Over time the extra social spending and reform got smaller and the corporate agenda got bigger. 

Umunna, Leslie and Smith want to turn the clock back to around 2008, to the most corporate, least attractive New Labour. They have now accepted the support of ex-Tory MPs like Anna Soubry, who want to turn the clock back to 2013. 

Soubry said the Tory-Lib Dem coalition “did a marvellous job” and George Osborne’s deep spending cuts were “absolutely necessary at the time.”

The Independent Group is the politics of the centre, and the “hard centre” means PFI, privatisation, austerity, bank deregulation and — as both Libya and Iraq showed — war. 

The Independent Group will get a lot of media support and, worryingly, a lot of hidden backing from some Labour MPs. It will get a honeymoon, so polls will show Labour’s vote under pressure. But if Labour responds with grassroots mobilisation against the pro-privatisation, corporate fix and tax-dodger politics, they can get past this latest bubble.

Some in the Independent Group say Labour’s failure to fully deal with anti-semitism drives them. I don’t doubt Luciana Berger is sincere here. 

I do doubt Angela “funny tinge” Smith is as committed to anti-racism. Or for that matter the Tory MPs who backed May’s “hostile environment.”  

But on issues of big principle, it doesn’t matter what your opponents say. I think Labour has a responsibility to take an initiative here — the big weakness, in my view, is not in discipline, but in education. In the 1980s the Labour Party was probably one of the biggest sources of anti-racist education. 

Through “municipal socialist” councils Labour did a huge amount to explain what racist stereotypes and “hidden” discrimination look like. During the New Labour years the party really let go of much of its educational role. Taking that educational role up again, to help guide the naive away from the nasty on anti-semitism, would be very worthwhile.

Jayawardena’s seat on the board 

LABOUR wants to renationalise the railways. But North East Hampshire Tory MP Ranil Jayawardena wants to work for them. 

According to the Register of MPs’ Interests, in January Jayawardena took on a new job on the advisory board of Great Western Railway (GWR), which runs — often overcrowded — trains from London Paddington to Bristol and beyond. 

Jayawardena won’t be getting a huge sum — £1,400 a year plus free train travel for four to six days’ work, but it all goes in to Ringshall Ltd, his growing personal consultancy business for the moonlighting MP. 

Jayawardena is so far getting around £43,000 a year paid to his Ringshall consultancy, in return for him sitting on the board of drug firm PepTcell ltd and chairing builder-recommendation firm TrustMark along with the GWR job. 

GWR’s advisory board, which is chaired by Labour Lord Richard Faulkner, is there to show the train company has “consulted” all its “stakeholders” — particularly “local authorities” and “members of Parliament.”  

Actually hiring an MP will presumably make it easy to consult other MPs. Oddly, Jayawardena’s own Aldershot-centred constituency is mostly served by rival train firm South Western Railway, not GWR.