Jeremy Corbyn, take note: leftwing remainers won’t stay silent on Brexit

Labour Live was conceived in the spirit of solidarity, optimism, and a playful hubris. The idea behind it presumably went: if you could get all of Glastonbury festival chanting Jeremy Corbyn’s name, who’s to say you couldn’t bring such a crowd to see him headline? Well, there were lots to say it. People at Glastonbury are largely in an incredibly good mood – it would be prim to speculate as to why – and in such conditions, someone you love a bit becomes someone you love a lot. But that doesn’t mean you can be relied upon to chant again.

Primed for the fall after such an act of pride, Corbyn critics turned up ready for a soggy English summer’s day with sparse crowds huddled round a single Unite ice-cream van. A friend who went said she saw so many journalists it was like going to Hay. Yet many of the hacks will have been disappointed. Corbyn’s popularity – not by Survation poll or focus group, but by the sheer human warmth he generates – is unmatched by any other British politician. The doggedness and the petulance with which commentators wave away the fact that he could fill a stadium with people who’d actually paid, while Theresa May couldn’t half-fill a factory floor in Leicester where people were at work anyway, is becoming absurd.

But the event also revealed something much more uncomfortable for the Labour party leadership, something it cannot ignore for ever. Awkwardly for its fixed manifesto position of “respect the referendum”, its membership is 87% remain. “Bollocks to Brexit” stickers were everywhere. Activists from Our Future Our Choice (OFOC) brought a banner saying “Stop backing Brexit”, and were met with a range of responses, according to its spokesman Calum Millbank-Murphy – from the strong support of the young, to the “you lot are childish wankers” evaluation of the old. Eventually, OFOC was persuaded to lay down its banner and some people duly stamped on it.

The faultline among Labour members is not whether this Tory Brexit is a shambles – thinly veiled racism vying with colonialist fantasy to see which can insist more trenchantly that the complicated is simple, a deficit is a dividend, black is white. Most would treat that as a matter of established fact. The argument, rather, is whether Corbyn is best served on his route to Downing Street by everyone swallowing their objections and taking his lead, or whether, conversely, the argument on Europe is absolutely central to a socialist government, and that all of its values – from workers’ rights to the environment, from solidarity with the European left to the defence and enhancement of public services – would be kiboshed by even the softest of Brexits.

The loyalists point to the MPs who use the remain or soft Brexit agenda as a means of returning the party to centrist hands. Those MPs are pretty transparent about it: Chris Leslie on Sunday launched his vision for centrist politics, which was mainly platitudes and occasionally a straight lift from Corbyn’s existing position – the message being, “Let’s not sweat the practicalities: politics is better when there are normal people like me in charge.” So yes, it’s a hiccup that the loudest anti-Brexit voice within the party also has no respect for its leader.

Also, Labour’s soft Brexit proposition – single market membership with a side order of anti-immigration rhetoric to sate their imaginary northerner – is terrible. It serves the interests of capital while casually letting go of the European Union institutions that protected the individual – the only thing the EU has going for it.

However, plenty of leftwing remainers don’t want to be backed into silence by someone else’s agenda. Plenty of us do not swallow this great taboo around respecting a referendum result, when the campaign was built on naked lies (before you even consider Russian troll bots and what other rules were broken). Plenty of us would be savagely critical of the EU, but with the aim of reforming it, not abandoning it. Plenty of us want to see a Corbyn government able to enact its vision without the catastrophic recession that will follow Brexit, the social division that’s already evident, and oh, tiny thing, the fact we need the closest possible left-European alliance to defeat the fascism that is plainly on the rise.

There seems to have been a tacit agreement among pro-Corbyn activists, from constituency parties to Momentum, that respectable people avoid making problems for their leadership, and concentrate on local issues. That argument is starting to unravel, not so much evidenced by that splash of confrontation at Labour Live, but the Momentum petition that launched at the weekend: it called, in much more supportive language, for a conference vote on stopping Tory Brexit.

If they get the signatures, the “democracy” aspect of party policy must be observed, and members must vote. It puts a logic bomb under the sense of apathy and inevitability: this is, in the end, a party committed to democratic renewal. It has to be ready for its debates to mean something. Labour in its “New” era was suffused with what psychoanalysts would call hysterical negativity, members having a mutually reinforcing bitch-fest with no prospect of effecting change. What a tragedy it would be if the Corbyn movement, in quashing debate for strategic advantage, became just Blairism with a beard.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist