The people spoke, and I spoke with them

It was the second biggest march in Britain this century.

670,000 people filed through the streets of London to say ‘no’ to Brexit and demand a second referendum – well, the third really, counting the one that voted to stay in in 1975. Why? So that people who voted Brexit in 2016 without knowing what it would look like, would have a chance to reconsider now that it’s become painfully clear.

The march stretches down London’s sun-filled streets

The march was cheerful and friendly under warm autumn sun. There were people of every age – grandparents pushing grandchildren in their buggies, the middle aged, young adults, students. There were people from every party, even the Tories – I talked to a couple of them and they seemed a little embarrassed, I suspect because they’d never taken part in a demonstration before.

It was uplifting just to be there.

There were also absences. The police presence was almost invisible: these weren’t people who were going to make trouble. Those weird fringe cults from the far left weren’t there either – Class War or the Socialist Workers Party or the Labour leadership. It seems they have trouble with the notion that leaving the EU will cost jobs and depress wages, and this isn’t generally an unmixed blessing for the working class the claim to represent.

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, was missed by some.

A good question. With a sadly predictable answer

He couldn’t be there. As at the last March, he was abroad, this time in Geneva. Though he hadn’t lost sight of the cause, as he assured us by tweet: he was talking to the former President of Chile Bachelet, now a UN Commissioner, telling her about workers’ rights and human rights. I’m not fully convinced that, as a former victim of the Pinochet regime, she really needed a tutorial from Jeremy but he provided one anyway.

Jeremy Corbyn: talking to a UN official about the harm of Brexit
rather than actually opposing it
In Geneva, too. Somebody had to go. And it's a safe distance from London

And while I don’t want to be picky, I can’t help feeling that doing something to stop Brexit might be more constructive than talking to a UN Commissioner about how awful the Tories are going to make it. But he clearly believes that he could make a far better job of Brexit than Theresa May is, which is odd considering that the other 27 countries of the EU are unlikely to change their position just because he takes charge.

What’s odd is that anyone still thinks Brexit is going to deliver benefits. In the nearly two and a half years of negotiation since the Brexit vote, no one has come up with a formula that might actually work. That’s ‘work’ in the sense of delivering Britain benefits greater than membership does.

Nor have they found a formula for which they can build majority support.

There’s a form of wisdom which it’s hard to master. Part of the difficulty is that it requires the courage to admit to a mistake, one of the rarest forms. Here’s how it goes.

You have a pet plan. It might be Brexit. It might be a challenging new plan at work. You build a case for it, but it doesn’t work – sometimes it doesn’t even convince you. So you compromise a bit and try again. You still can’t make a case that’s really persuasive, even to yourself who wrote it. Now you can keep on going, from rewrite to rewrite, tweaking the assumptions, changing the approach.

The wisdom is to accept at a certain point that the problem isn’t in the way you’re building the arguments. It’s that your pet project, however attractive it seemed to you initially, really wasn’t that good. That the only intelligent conclusion is that you have to drop the idea altogether and try something different.

Now, I know that it would be hard for Brexiters, like May or Corbyn, to admit they got it wrong. Neither has shown the guts to accept that they sometimes need to question even their most cherished opinions. There’s an easy solution: put the question back to the people. If the people vote for Brexit again, we have no choice. We accept it for better or for worse (and there’s little chance it’ll be for the better). If they vote against, the politicians are off the hook.

Jacob's crackers are cheese biscuits and Jacob Rees-Mogg,
leading Brexiter in the Tory Party, certainly seems crackers

670,000 people gave them that opening on 20 October. If that many turned up for a march – and only 1200 took part in the pro-Brexit event in Harrogate – it says there’s a far larger reservoir of such feeling across the country. That’s an opportunity for a party to step forward, take the leadership of a growing and dynamic swell of opinion, and lead it to victory. Victory as much for itself as well as for the movement. What an opportunity for Labour if it chose really to oppose the current government. And we saw on the march that there are plenty of Labour figures prepared to take that leadership – just not the current leader who preferred to be in Geneva.

The People’s vote march was the second-biggest of the century. The biggest of all mobilised something between 750,000 and 2 million people, depending on who you believe. It failed to stop the Iraq war. If none of our politicians has the guts to step forward in response to this one, it too will fail.

And a lot of people, mostly the people Labour should be representing, will be paying a high price for that failure for at least a generation.

Tee-shirt on the march
Yes. Labour has had better times