‘Madness then and madness now’: People’s Vote rally sees campaigners demand second say in city that became ‘face of Brexit’

Sunderland voted by 61 per cent in favour of leaving the EU in 2016 but politicians, entrepreneurs and residents reckon region is changing its mind

It is the city where, for Remainers, the nightmare began.

Sunderland was the one of the first places in the UK to announce its EU referendum results on 23 June 2016 – and offered the earliest sign that history was about to be upended.

The one-time shipbuilding giant was always expected to vote Leave. But it was the sheer scale of the Brexit victory here that sent shockwaves across the country and around the world.

Pollsters had predicted the vote would be split by six points. In fact, it was 22. It was a verifiable hammering. The pound tumbled by 3 per cent on the announcement. On TV, experts scrambled to work out what a similar margin of error would mean if it was repeated all over the UK. It could be a tremor, one noted with uncanny prescience, which foretells an earthquake.

Yet if Sunderland offered the earliest indication that Britain had bought into Brexit, it might also just be the place, campaigners hope, where the fight for a new people’s vote takes flight.

This was the loud and clear message during a Let Us Be Heard rally at the city’s Beacon Of Light conference centre yesterday – the second of 15 such events being held across the country this summer.

More than 400 people turned up here on a sunny afternoon to hear politicians, campaigners and local business people – including comedian Mitch Benn, city entrepreneur Paul Callaghan and London MP David Lammy – demand a second referendum during a series of speeches.

“Brexit?” fumes the latter to huge cheers. “I said it was madness the day after we did it, and I say it’s madness now.”

When he had started out in politics, the Labour member for Tottenham, told the audience at one point, he had been described as resembling a young Denzel Washington. “The turmoil we’re in has turned me into an old Forest Whitaker,” he adds.

The event may not have been comparable with the movement’s great London marches over the last year.

But it was a show of northern strength in a city which has all too often, organisers say, been unfairly characterised as being an almost exclusively Leave-supporting area.

“We get that all the time,” Louise Brown, a committee member with North East for Europe, tells me afterwards. “The city has become this face of Brexit because we were the first to announce, and it’s just not an accurate representation of the place I love.”

She remembers first setting up the Sunderland branch of her group soon after the referendum: “We hired a room above a pub for our first meeting but there was a mix up with the booking and we had to do it in the main bar,” the 43-year-old speech therapist said. “We weren’t sure whether to go ahead. We had this vision of it all kicking off. But we got people coming up to us, just having a pint, saying they agreed and wishing us luck... That really drove home that there’s more to Sunderland than the result of one vote.”

Certainly, this was a point Sunday’s audience exemplified and was keen to stress.

They waved EU banners, wore heart stickers proclaiming their love of “pet passports” and “regional investment” and shuddered as one at the thought of Boris Johnson as prime minister.

People’s Vote campaigners in Sunderland (Independent)

“Actually, I’m weirdly OK with that,” compere Mitch Benn says at one point, suggesting the wannabe Conservative leader may be lying when he tells his party he will push through a a no-deal Brexit if necessary. “He’ll drop it quicker than a bucket of hot manure – or a wife over 40,” the comedian notes.

The arguments for a people’s vote were the same here as have been oft-repeated: leaving the EU would damage the economy, reduce investment, leave the NHS open to predatory privatisation, risk food shortages and reduce the UK’s ability to deal with global threats such as terrorism, climate change and cyber attacks.

But it was the impact on jobs that especially worried many of those in attendance. A report by the House of Commons Brexit Committee has said the economy in the north east would contract by 16 per cent if no-deal happens, while car giant Nissan – the city’s biggest employer – has already announced it will not build its flagship new X-Trail SUV here, a move it partially put down to the continuing uncertainty.

“We’ve seen before in Sunderland what happens when industry closes and when jobs go,” Bridget Phillipson, Labour MP for Houghton and Sunderland South, pointedly tells the audience. “The unemployment, the despair, the years it takes just trying to get back on our feet. We cannot let that happen again.”

Speaking to her before she takes to the stage, I wonder how she felt, as the MP, when that early result came through in 2016.

“We’d known it wasn’t going well,” she says. “It didn’t come as a shock. It chimed with conversations we’d been having on the doorsteps because there was a real sense of anger and frustration amongst local people about the state of our country, about lack of funding for local services, about the fact they felt held back that we didn’t have the jobs and investment we needed. And I shared all that. I just didn’t believe that leaving the EU was the way to solve any of it.”

Have those feelings on the doorstep really changed, though? Would a vote go in favour of Remain next time round? “There is far less certainty that leaving the EU would provide the answers to those issues,” she says. “Lots of people have changed their mind.”

This event is not, it should be said, just a Labour love-in. Rachel Featherstone, a Green Party candidate during May’s European parliament elections, calls Sunderland’s decision to leave the EU an act of self-harm that was down to the city being all but abandoned by Westminster, while former Conservative MP Neil Carmichael says the union was one of the finest international institutions ever created.

“We want peace in Europe, we want peace across the world, and we have had that for 70 years,” he says in a line which the average Iraqi, for example, might not necessarily agree with – although his point, presumably, that the EU is good for European stability is widely applauded.

As the crowd walks out into the sun afterwards, they do so with what appears to be renewed optimism that a people’s vote might happen – and, just as importantly, might be won.

“I wasn’t even up when the Sunderland result was announced in 2016,” says Alan Brennan, a 67-year-old educational consultant from nearby Darlington. “I’d gone to bed because, to me, staying in the EU was the only sensible option.

“I couldn’t imagine, as a country, we would commit this act of stupidity. But now we have done, we have to come out and fight to put things right. We have to go out and win this argument for all our futures’ sake.”