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Against the renationalisation of public utilities
Against a 50p top rate of income tax
Against abolishing tuition fees
The #IndependentGroup looks like Conservatism minus Brexit
newstatesman.com/politics/uk/20…
Against a 50p top rate of income tax
Against abolishing tuition fees
The #IndependentGroup looks like Conservatism minus Brexit
newstatesman.com/politics/uk/20…
Chris Leslie + Chuka Umunna were partly responsible for Miliband’s defeat in 2015. Leslie promised to sustain Tory spending cuts for “decades ahead”. His Zero-Based Review threatened to extend them to the NHS. Labour would complete Osborne’s programme “to eradicate the deficit”.
Chuka Umunna announced Labour will be “radical in reforming our economy” in support of “a determinedly pro-business agenda”. They more or less eliminated the difference between Labour and the Tories on economic matters. I wrote about them both in 2014: monbiot.com/2014/06/10/the…
This approach formed the basis of the 2015 Labour Manifesto, that gave us a choice between real Tories and a party parroting Tory economic policies. Now they are using the Independent Group as a vehicle for the same dismal, hope-free politics. monbiot.com/2015/04/15/the…
And this is before we look at what the former Conservatives in the Independent Group have to offer. newstatesman.com/politics/econo… 
The Independent Group doesn’t look like the future to me. It looks like the past. A past that failed us.
The vote to leave the EU was arguably a response to the closure of political choice engineered by the likes of Chris Leslie and Chuka Umunna, and the austerity and neoliberalism promoted by both parties, that offered nothing but continued misery.
Now the engineers of these failed politics present themselves as our saviours. We cannot get out of our mess with the same thinking that got us into it.
Several people are telling me: "let's just stop Brexit first, then we can sort out the other stuff". But what if Brexit was a response to "the other stuff"? ie continued austerity and neoliberalism of the kind that members of the Independent Group have championed.
If so, then stopping Brexit - even if this is possible - doesn't actually solve very much. The roots of division and conflict remain, and people will understandably take any change they can to aim a flying kick at the system, as they did in the referendum.
sorry - "any chance"
If you want opposition to Brexit AND an end to the politics that contribiuted to it, @TheGreenParty offers both.
