Nearly four years ago, the United Kingdom went to the polls. At the time, living in south London, I weighed up the options on my ballot paper. A Labour Party selling mugs with the slogan, “Controls on Immigration,” not traditionally a stirring socialist phrase; a leader who’d campaigned in front of an absurd eight-foot high concrete slab that ended up functioning as his own political tombstone; and a local candidate so center-right I ended up spoiling my ballot. The country seemingly felt similarly: what should have been an easy win for Labour instead became a victory for the Conservatives, and caused such turmoil in Labour that Jeremy Corbyn secured a surprise and thumping victory in the race for the party leadership.

The local candidate I deemed so undesirable as to deny him my vote this week left the party and created a new outfit that he insisted wasn’t a party: Chuka Umunna joined with seven Labour MPs and three Conservatives to forge a centrist party no one had asked for. The Liberal Democrats already exist, after all — and poll abysmally. Asked what they stood for, the new grouping championed austerity and the Conservatives’ previous public service cuts, oppose both nationalization (one of the most popular of Labour’s policies) and increases in marginal tax rates on the wealthiest, and oppose Brexit. In an interview with the BBC, former Conservative MP Anna Soubry said the group was in favor of “sensible policies for a stable economy,” a phrase utterly devoid of meaning: no party is openly advocating “absolute lunacy for a blazing garbage fire of an economy”.

But it speaks to the patronizing philosophical core of centrism: that conservatism, liberalism and democratic socialism are all mere distractions, and that a Frankenstein’s monster of a party combining the worst of all their aspects is what the public are crying out for. What have “The Independent Group” created? A party squarely of the establishment, almost designed by committee to appeal exclusively to career politicians and newspaper columnists.