Labour’s reluctant leaders hold the key to a Remain coalition against Farage

It appears that the party’s leadership, not content with its current unsatisfactory fudges about Europe and a Final Say referendum, would rather wish the whole question would go away

Donald Tusk, Anglophile, former Polish premier and president of the European Council, has said he estimates the chances of Brexit being cancelled are about 30 per cent.

It sounds about right, given that the UK has spent the best part of three years trying to work out a workable “good Brexit” – and failing. Mr Tusk’s rough calculation mirrors that of financial markets. The momentum is palpably falling away from the Brexit movement, poleaxed, as it has been, by its internal contradictions. It is as if the British had applied for a three-year distance-learning course in why having your cake and eating it is a logical impossibility. We are about to receive our degree certificate.

Even so, the rise of Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party has given the Brexiteers some cause to believe that the spirit of 2016 – albeit a spirit that gave them only a modest margin of victory in a fatally flawed referendum – is rising again.

The Brexit Party is leading in the opinion polls for the European elections, and has a professional air about its activities. That is not to endorse it; merely to acknowledge the skills, albeit sometimes amounting to base cunning, of the seasoned Mr Farage. He is no stranger to campaigning, controversy or conflict: underestimate him at your peril.

He has successfully sidelined his old home, Ukip, as a party of extremism (no hint of irony from the man who gave us the “Breaking Point” poster), and has made the most of the Conservatives’ undeclared civil war. The Brexit vote has coalesced around him, and in its sharpest form. If only his adversaries were so adept.

Mr Farage appears to have as much support in the polls now as his old party, Ukip, had in 2014. It is fair to ask, in this context, where the Remain Party is.

Of course, it does not exist. There are many Remain parties: Lib Dems, Greens, Change UK, as well as the SNP, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Fein, the SDLP and others.

The three UK-wide parties unequivocally committed to keeping Britain in the EU, subject to a Final Say referendum, have failed even to agree on a temporary alliance for the Peterborough by-election in a few weeks.

In a first-past-the-post system, that could easily mean that the Brexit Party, the Conservatives or Labour accidentally win the seat – on a minority of the vote – that would be misconstrued as a mandate for some form of Brexit, where no such sentiment necessarily exists. The Peterborough contest – one parliamentary seat amounting to a total electorate of 75,000 – was never going to be a convincing proxy referendum for either side.

For the European elections, the system of proportional representation makes the argument for a united front less compelling, but there is still some danger of the pro-EU vote being dissipated while the anti-EU vote concentrates around Mr Farage.

Yet while criticism may be levelled at the Greens, the Liberal Democrats and Change UK for their failure to recognise that they share far more in common on Europe than that which divides them, the main absentee from the Remain party (in both senses of “party”) is Labour.

According to one of the shadow cabinet’s more unreconstructed personalities, Richard Burgon, Labour “doesn’t exist to stop Brexit”. Mr Burgon says the real divide in the UK is between workers and the wealthy, not Leave and Remain. Here he echoes his chief, Jeremy Corbyn, who has come up with a nice line about Brexit, downplaying its importance in a socialist Britain where the interest of the many will take precedence over the few.

It appears that the Labour leadership, not content with its current unsatisfactory fudges about Europe and a Final Say referendum, would rather wish the whole question was just downgraded and would go away.

But Labour MPs realise, some more than others, that no measure of British socialism will be sufficient to provide the jobs that will be lost under any form of Brexit, including the Labour Brexit Mr Corbyn advertises (and which of course has never been negotiated, let alone agreed, with the EU).

The lost GDP, the lost wages, the lost tax revenues, the rising unemployment – a Labour government would no doubt seek to remedy these through radical measures and massive public investment. However it is by no means certain that such remedies would work. It might well be asked why, post-Brexit, a Labour government would spend precious public funds on saving jobs and taking a car factory into public ownership, say, when its fate can be secured by removing the reason for its closure in the first place, by stopping Brexit.

The British people could also be asked whether they wish to go ahead with EU withdrawal on any given terms – Labour’s, Theresa May’s, Boris Johnson’s?

As Mr Corbyn used to say much more frequently, the Labour Party is a democratic party that belongs to its members, not its leaders, its MPs or anyone else. He knows that the vast majority of his members loathe Brexit more than anything, and possibly more than they love him. If anything, Europhilia runs even more strongly among the youthful Momentum group than in the older guard of activists. Either way, Mr Corbyn is defying his members in the way Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair used to, much to his annoyance.

Mr Burgon is quite wrong: the Labour Party is very much a Remain party and a second referendum party, too. It might even be a willing partner – were Labour Party members canvassed – in a national Remain alliance with other progressive political parties, dedicated to working together on this, and only this, transcendent issue. They would then surely beat the Conservatives and the Brexit Party combined.

If Mr Corbyn, Mr Burgon and the rest of his shadow cabinet will not take the initiative, lead a new coalition on Remain and defeat Mr Farage’s right-wing, anti-immigrant, anti-European opposition, then Labour members must. Labour is a democratic institution, with a substantial number of members. It is time for them to speak – and act. Soon it may be far too late to stop Brexit or stop Mr Farage.