Meet the Brexit resistance

A new kind of person is emerging in Britain, anti-Brexit and fiercely pro-European. But you won’t find them among the aging statesmen leading the People’s Vote campaign. They’re flying under the radar in a myriad of loosely connected grassroots networks. They are the Brexit resistance.

Looking at the TV clips from London it’s easy to get the impression that, when it comes to Brexit, all the emotion is on the Leave side. There they are in their yellow vests bullying MPs as they walk to the House of Commons. There’s the Prime Minister warning of a breakdown in social cohesion if Brexit is not “delivered”. And then, on the other side, there’s the tired old technocrats like Tony Blair making their tired old pleas for more British exceptionalism.

Let me tell you what it feels like inside that in-group, at least for some of us. In the beginning there was resignation. It had been a passionless campaign and defeat left us pliable. But then we were provoked. The blithe interpretation of the result as legally binding. The attempt to by-pass Parliament. The unprepared Article 50 notification. The denunciation, as of a traitor, of all who disagreed with these choices. The failure to heed the loss of the majority in the General Election. Revelation of the crimes of the Leave campaigns. Lie after lie. The humiliating incompetence of the British negotiators. The economic warning lights flashing red. The reckless speed of it all.

I say “we”. You can find some of us under the hashtag #FBPE — Follow Back, Pro-European. But this is just a corner of it, there is no list or institution of the resistance. Brexit cuts deeper than party lines but within the Labour Party of which I am a member there are at least seven different national grassroots groups attempting to steer Jeremy Corbyn, three of which are in effect secret. Nonetheless, we resisters can recognise each other in the pub. It’s in the way the fury spills out — spontaneous, unbridled, passionate. Completely un-British, and liberating.

When we discuss a second referendum campaign, we have no time for half measures. Europe may not be perfect, but for Britain it is part of the solution, not the problem. Freedom of movement? Abso-bloody-lutely.

This kind of passion is the most powerful fuel in politics. It is something new in Britain and should be considered when the EU decides now what to do. One option is to make Brexit easy for Theresa May, usher the UK gently out, park it in an orbit of economic decay and wait for it to ask to re-join, chastened — Brexit pour encourager les autres. The other is to make Brexit difficult for Mrs May, a scenario that has become easier to read since Christmas.

If the EU gives no ground on the Irish backstop, Mrs May cannot get her deal through the House of Commons. Meanwhile, the MPs’ rebel alliance of Dominic Grieve, Yvette Cooper and John Bercow is forcing through the legislation to prevent No Deal. The UK will probably ask for a delay.

True, the request may come without a clear plan, but time in this case is a weapon. Brexit has always been a race between the reality of betrayal and the realisation of it. Hence Mrs May’s obscurantism and speed, aiming to get Britain out before it understood what her kind of out meant. So time can now undo her. The longer it goes on, the clearer the damage to Britain, the clearer the essential impossibilities and betrayal of Brexit itself. Week by week, one Leaver at a time, the polls are shifting our way.

This choice is one for the EU to make. But Brexit is just part of a net of right-wing populism stretching from Hungary to Poland to the Americas and touching everyone in between. It starts by undermining democratic norms and moves on to corrupting institutions and killing people. Brexit is exactly this. It’s not “chaos” in London but a constitution that has been broken by the Brexiteers. The idea that killed Gdansk’s Paweł Adamowicz is the idea that killed Yorkshire’s Jo Cox. It has to be fought.

But who am I to issue such an invitation?

I am nobody.

I am the resistance.

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