Both Labour and Conservative MPs are frustrated with their parties. So they're forming a new one.
Brexit isn't the only political crisis tearing the U.K.'s Parliament apart.
Three Conservative and eight Labour members of Parliament have left their parties in the past few days, and they have a surprisingly unified reason, BBC reports. All the defectors are fed up with Brexit proceedings and how their parties are being run, so they're coming together under a newly formed Independent Party.
Britain voted in June 2016 to leave the European Union, but just how that's happening has been a total mystery ever since. Parliament hasn't confirmed a Brexit deal with the EU, it doesn't really want a Brexit with no deal, and it hasn't opted for a referendum on the entire thing. Prime Minister Theresa May has just barely retained her seat through it all.
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The leadership crisis has spanned both major parties, with seven Labour MPs first announcing their resignation from the party on Monday, CNN says. One defector, Luciana Berger, cited anti-Semitism within the party and said it had been "hijacked by the machine politics of the hard left." Joan Ryan, an eighth Labour defector, joined the new Independent Group on Tuesday. And on Wednesday, three Conservatives joined the Independents on account of "this government's disastrous handling of Brexit," they said in a letter to May.
The 11-member, centrist party is already united under the premise of fixing a "broken" political system, per its Twitter. The Labour Party is now seemingly worried about losing more MPs, as staffers lost access to voter rolls Wednesday, per The Guardian.
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Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.
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