The mainstream media are often not very good at predicting what may come next. One of the reasons for that is that they report on things that have happened and not on movements and trajectories that may lead to things happening in the future. What is happening on the Brexit Left is worth considering in that context.

We are used to seeing Brexit as something that appeals to the nationalist Right. In fact, there is a substantial working class, socialist and even Labour Movement Brexit community that is hidden from view. It is divided as to strategy, has few prominent leaders and is excluded from the processes by which candidates and officers in the Labour Party are selected but it exists. It represents a lot of voters usually committed to Labour who simultaneously like Corbyn's socialist populism but are highly distrustful of the Labour Party and its liberal cultural policies. Where are they likely to head politically in the coming months and years?

The Full Brexit meeting last held in London last night was fascinating from this perspective. The bulk of the panel, which included a former Syriza member and leading intellectual Professor Costas Lapavitsas and Grace Blakeley from the New Statesman, were, by the end of the meeting, rather desperately trying to hold on to the idea that a Left or Socialist Brexit was possible through the Labour Party. However, a superb speech by Eddie Dempsey of the RMT created an atmosphere of ambiguity about this that was picked up very quickly by the audience.

The debate became impassioned from the floor (although always civilised). The bulk of the feeling in the room, as I interpreted it, was for collaboration with the Brexit Right against the system. The immediate question was whether to turn up at Parliament Square on March 29th for a demonstration organised by the 'Faragists' and where Tommy Robinson might also be present. The official line was to do what one liked as individuals but to have no banners. It would, in this traditional left-wing view, be guilt by association with fascists in trying to persuade the rest of the Left to shift sides from Remain to Brexit with fears of a right-wing or Tory Brexit. The analysis began to break down under scrutiny. For a start, half the audience refused to accept that Farage was a 'fascist' - he was just a typical country Tory who had done more for Brexit than any socialist since Tony Benn and his democratic credentials were there for all to see. Pigeon-holing him (as opposed to Tommy Robinson) as Far Right was just not going to work.

The Full Brexit as an organisation is very important in this context because it is run by seriously intelligent mainstream people who know how the Left works and it concentrates on the sort of Britain we might want after Brexit rather than just on the Remain/Leave Debate. To have a significant part of its audience begin to question the traditional definitions of who was a fascist and who was not and to speak of collaboration across the lines against a common enemy (the liberal centre) was eye-opening. This is new ...

In essence, the middle class intellectuals were going for "Socialism First, Brexit Second" and so for electing Corbyn as a socialist populist in the hope that 'objective conditions' would have him implement Brexit. The 'scruffy herberts' in the audience (people in the front line, if you like), all seriously Left, were by a roughly 2:1 majority (by my reckoning) going for "Brexit First, Socialism Second" with a previously unthinkable 'he's not so bad, that Farage' attitude.

I think we should take this shift very seriously ... a working class vote has nowhere to go now except abstention (from Labour) and tactical and protest voting. It distrusts Corbyn (referred to in my hearing as a 'coward', 'weak' and a 'hippy') because of his caving in on the Second Referendum. Culturally working class voters (this is important to understand) see the First Referendum as an exercise in giving them 'agency' after years of neglect. They see the middle class attempt not to implement that decision as an attempt to manipulate them out of that agency, an agency that Labour has not granted them since the liberal middle classes acquired control of the Party and excluded the trades unions from the centre of power under New Labour. It is about democracy and the European Union, of course, but it is also about class struggle expressed in cultural terms - so class struggle, Jim, but not as we used to know it.

The demand from some in the audience for a new Left Party is not going to happen. The bulk of the panel's strategy is a matter of years and not months in a game that is being decided in weeks and days. If a national populist movement emerged with a strong anti-capitalist tinge, I now believe that that Left vote could move across quite quickly to it, much as it has done in many European countries. This is a new factor in the medium to long term game.

The intellectual socialists BTW tended to have a rather old-fashioned model of socialist economics. This cannot be said to have inspired the audience as much as I would have expected. The followers are now moving faster forward in understanding economic realities than their leaders. This cultural dynamic is new and quite aggressive. A substantial minority is more interested in cultural politics and the return of 'working class agency' (rather despising Labour as a middle class liberal party with a public sector base) as a means of getting social and economic transformation in their interest than in intellectual solutions in which they have no agency.

There are similar things happening on the Tory side. The lower middle class/small business element is very angry at the current turn of events. Some have developed an anti-big business critique that merges with the working class critique even if the two class elements are not entirely aware of how much they have in common yet. Just mention the CBI and TUC in the same breath and you will get much the same negative reaction. Indeed, speaking afterwards with a former leading Communist, the latter was all too aware of this and seemed to see this as an opportunity rather than a problem.

These are interesting straws in the wind. The targeting of both major parties in a flanking movement from both Right and Left using Brexit as a unifying force (there is also a third force emerging in centrist/social democrat Brexit operations such as the SDP which is growing quite fast) is something that has potential, not to replace the Remain Parliament with a Brexit Parliament in the next General Election but to weaken fatally both major parties and then see a new alignment in due course.

My best guess is that Left Brexit may be thwarted in the end by a Tory revolt that exudes its centrists and turns the Party into a soft national populist vehicle which stifles something harder to its Right. The struggle then becomes the control of Labour and the Centre between competing factions out of which a Socialist Brexit Party might theoretically emerge although the odds of this are low.

Given events unfolding in Europe, the existing order is probably now under long term threat to the extent that a failure to deliver Brexit (now identified as No Deal) unravels a legitimacy that has stood since 1688. At worst, the blunders of the May Government will have created the potential conditions for the sort of urban violence and rural resistance we saw in Northern Ireland in the past. At best, it will strain the elite to the limit and eventually see it snap with a national populist cultural resistance that thinks, ironically, along European lines.

The oddest unintended consequence of this farrago may be that British national populism engages in the new Europe that is emerging while liberals look on with mounting horror and wonder precisely what their resistance was all for. The logic is Labour being steadily degraded by the rise of a working and lower middle class national populism for reasons of culture and distrust as much as anything else.

In short, thwarting Brexit paradoxically enhances the revolutionary potential of Brexit ... its absence rather than presence creates the 'revolution' (more cultural than anything else) whereas an elite Brexit would have dampened down the growing and widespread sense of outrage at the loss of respect for voting rights and 'agency' (as Brexiters now see it).

Currently huge swathes of that angry and disillusioned vote are saying that 'they will never vote again' (which theoretically helps the existing system) but what they are actually saying is that 'they will never vote for the established parties again'. This withdrawing of the vote will eventually return if the right vehicle appears. In other words, in the long run, there is still something to play for as the 'left behinds' prepare for any failure of economic recovery or the disruption created by automation. The mainstream system can thwart a plebiscitary vote through its control of the implementation mechanism but it cannot thwart democracy itself ... at least not for a long time.

The question is what that vehicle will be, given so many competitors for the space. As each day goes by, it is less and less likely to be a socialist vehicle - Corbyn's decision to adopt a Second Referendum position changed that and European Socialist Parties (actually left-liberal parties) appear to be in terminal decline in many parts of the continent. The intellectual socialists will keep arguing their case but the base they need to change the party in a project that will take years is drifting away ... it may be looking for another home already. Labour has only itself to blame. It may win the next battle and be at the head of some weak liberal centrist coalition but it is already losing the war ... which is extremely sad for many young people who had placed such high hopes in it.