LONDON — Seven pro-European lawmakers announced Monday morning that they were quitting the opposition Labour Party over their frustration with its leader Jeremy Corbyn’s handling of Brexit and anti-Semitism allegations.
The group said that they would sit in Parliament as an independent group of lawmakers.
At a morning news conference, lawmaker Luciana Berger that she had become “embarrassed” and “ashamed” of the Labour Party, which she said was “institutionally anti-Semitic.” She added she was leaving behind a culture of “bullying, bigotry and intimidation.”
Chris Leslie, another breakaway lawmaker, said that the party had been “hijacked by the machine politics of the hard left,” and that Labour’s “betrayal on Europe was visible for all to see.”
He added that “our differences go far deeper than Brexit.”
“The last three years have confirmed how irresponsible it would be to allow this leader of the opposition to take the office of prime minister of the United Kingdom. Many people still in the Labour Party will privately admit this to be true,” he said.
“The pursuit of policies that would threaten our national security through hostility to NATO. The refusal to act when needed to help those when facing humanitarian distress, preferring to believe states hostile to our country rather than believing our police and security services — these are all rooted in the Labour leadership’s obsession with a narrow, outdated ideology.”
The defection of a small number of politicians can dramatically change the political weather. In 2014, two Conservative lawmakers defected to the U.K. Independence Party, which rattled the Conservative Party.
There have long been rumors that a new centrist party could emerge — there are deep divisions in the Conservative Party as well over Brexit.
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