CAST your mind back to June 2018. You might remember lots of very friendly media reports of attempts to disrupt Labour Live, a big Labour rally in north London. 

The press all said this was a popular youth rebellion by pro-Labour “anti-Brexit” campaigners. But the most prominent of these “rebels” are now working for pro-Brexit Tories.

The Daily Mirror, for example, carried a very friendly report about protesters who unfurled a “Stop Backing Brexit” banner among the crowd in the outdoor festival, just as Jeremy Corbyn took to the stage. 

In 2018 Labour’s stance was to not to try reverse the recent pro-Brexit referendum, but to negotiate a better Brexit instead.

The Mirror quoted two protesters. One of them, Will Dry of anti-Brexit campaign group Our Future Our Choice, told the Mirror: “The voices of the young matter. Our voices matter.

“And today we used our collective voice to send a message to Corbyn that he needs to stop backing Brexit and represent the young people of Britain.”

Our Future Our Choice was a very small, well-funded anti-Brexit group, which claimed to be a “youth” campaign but was actually founded by a middle-aged corporate lobbyist. It called for a second referendum on Brexit — a so called “People’s Vote” — to overturn the first. 

Where is Will Dry now? Last November Dry became a special adviser to Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Dry is working in the policy and briefing unit of a very right-wing, very pro-Brexit Prime Minister.

Let’s go back to 2018. The second anti-Brexit protester the Daily Mirror interviewed was Melantha Chittenden, who was associated with another small, stunt-driven group called For Our Future’s Sake. 

She told the Mirror she was “proud to have stood in support of a People’s Vote at Labour Live today,” adding: “We are a democratic party — members can and will have their voices heard.”

Where is Chittenden now? In February 2023 she became a senior manager for Fleetwood Strategy, the lobbying company founded, owned and run by Isaac Levido, the Tory election strategist. 

Levido ran Boris Johnson’s 2019 election campaign — under the slogan “Get Brexit Done” — and will run Sunak’s election campaign. 

His company, Fleetwood Strategy, represents controversial corporations like Palantir — the data firm run by Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel which is chasing NHS contracts — construction giant Balfour Beatty and online letting agent AirBnB.

The move of supposedly anti-Brexit Labour supporters to work for pro-Brexit Tories suggests the whole “anti-Brexit” campaign aimed at Labour was a fraud. 

Right-wing careerists like Dry and Chittenden had no hope of top jobs under a left-wing Labour government. So they seized on the “anti-Brexit” issue as a way of building their CVs by undermining Labour’s left-wing leadership. 

In the end, foolishly, Labour gave in to these media-promoted campaigns. Labour lumbered itself with a second referendum policy which heavily contributed to the 2019 Labour defeat.

Many of those associated with the campaign, who claimed such a deep principled commitment to reversing Brexit have since — like Dry, Chittenden and even Keir Starmer — completely reversed their position and now support exiting the EU.

The media could have easily spotted how these supposed anti-Brexit campaigns were pretty opportunist at the time. Dry had no real Labour Party history, while Chittenden was from the very right-wing, sectarian Labour right. 

The idea they were in tune with or wanted to appeal to Labour’s left-wing grassroots during the Corbyn years was absurd. 

Their organisations were well-funded, but were actually small and dependent on paid-for advertising, stunts and friendly media. 

Labour Live was one of the less well-organised Corbyn events, but the “protesters” who got so much press coverage were still a tiny minority in the crowd. 

The names of their groups Our Future Our Choice (OFOC) and For Our Future’s Sake (FFS) were designed to convey to middle-aged journalists a feeling of youthful rebellious cheek, punning on the word “fuck.” But it looks like the future they fought for was their own future as unprincipled political careerists.

Tom Baldwin, who ran communications with the People’s Vote second referendum campaign, working with OFOC and FFS later admitted: “There were constantly people who wanted it to be an anti-Labour thing, an anti-Corbyn thing, a realignment thing, a Liberal Democrat thing, a proportional vote thing.”

Baldwin was particularly talking about Roland Rudd, the City lobbyist and brother of Tory Minister Amber Rudd, in charge of the People’s Vote. 

But his description matches many in the campaign. The People’s Vote was a magnet for anti-Corbyn people who wanted to realign politics to fit their careers. 

By attacking and undermining Labour, the campaign ensured that instead of getting a compromise, the People’s Vote helped both a Tory victory and the “hardest” of Brexits.

At the Labour Live event in 2018, Corbyn gave a speech in which he said Labour would not try and reverse Brexit, but instead would seek to “reach a trade and customs arrangement with Europe that enhances our trade opportunities with Europe, makes sure there’s no hard border in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and that we have an investment-led economy that conquers austerity.”

Had People’s Vote people really been interested in better relations with Europe, they could have backed this compromise. 

But the “centre ground” activists, supposedly interested in compromise, would not compromise on their main principle — their right to be important. 

Under Corbyn Labour had picked its battleground: Labour was fighting on basic battles which were popular with voters but unpopular with the Establishment — higher spending on public services, higher taxes on the rich, nationalisation of essential services. 

The People’s Vote then lumbered Labour with a new battleground, reversing Brexit — which was unpopular with Labour voters. 

This helped Labour lose the 2019 election and ensured a Tory-run “hard” Brexit. The way the former supposed “ultra” Remainers have since embraced both Brexit and even Tory-linked jobs suggests this was all a game played to advance their own careers.