The Tiggers - Change UK - are not that into change

Embed from Getty Images

The SDP spent its early days talking about "breaking the mould". In retrospect, though, it looks more like a last attempt to preserve the mould of postwar politics.

There is nothing discreditable in that: we all feel at home with the assumptions we grew up with and in many ways the postwar settlement was preferable to what replaced it.

But it does remind us that the way people present themselves may not be the way an objective observer sees them.

So I wonder if the Tiggers, in half-rebranding themselves as Change UK, are really about change.

We still have little idea of what they want to change, while it is clear that its MPs are desperate to avoid change. They want to stay at Westminster and retain their importance.

There is nothing wrong with that either, and the way that both their parties have changed in recent years is very much for the worse.

But the way the Tiggers look likely to get in the way of the Greens and Liberal Democrat resurgence at the Euro elections does remind us that change isn't really what they are about.

It's hard to see the Tigger MPs embracing the Extinction Rebellion protests, for instance, and equally hard to know what it is they want to change other than having themselves back at the centre of things.

Deep down, what they really want is for the past few years not to have happened and for everything to be what it was half a dozen years ago.

Sadly, that is not possible.