I marched for a “people’s vote”. I co-wrote a book making the case for one, a case that included a massive programme of reform. I have argued for it in many public meetings. Britain can and must be a member of this club of like-minded European states at the global standard-setting centre of the world’s largest free-trading network. It transcends the World Trade Organization in importance and reach, confirmed on Friday by the Japan-EU trade deal.

For the EU is the enabler of prosperity and guarantor of peace in Europe. It is the friend of every principal economic interest group – from farmers to magic circle law firms, from university lecturers to trade unionists. The British are culturally and philosophically Europeans, even though too many still believe in the myth of our Dunkirk spirit exceptionalism.

One day, I have no doubt, a second public vote will reverse Brexit. Minds will be changed by the lived experience of the economic stagnation ahead – already darkening as investment in the car industry has plunged 80% over the past three years, with turmoil in aerospace and aviation – and by growing awareness that the country was sold a lie by a bunch of vainglorious, ex-public-school boys.

The prospect that this second vote might be this year, as seemed a likely possibility only weeks ago, still exists, but it is receding. Last week’s series of parliamentary votes (and the lack of one on a people’s vote, pulled for lack of support) showed that the Tory party might ultimately sufficiently unify over the shabby, spatchcock May Brexit that so betrays our interests. Combine this with the vacillatory non-leadership in the Labour party, not even backing its own policies, and naked pork barrel politics, then her deal has a rising chance of being passed – as long as the EU throws her the bone of even marginal softening of arrangements on the Irish border.

However, this will settle nothing. The deal will be a suppurating sore at the heart of British politics for years. Remainers will morph into Returners (I will be one), insistent that Leave sold the country a lie and that committing to Europe while reforming at home is the precondition to break out of the low growth, high inequality, low trade economy and noxiously riven society the Brexit Tory party will deliver. Leavers, backed by their hysterical, obsessive media, will insist that only the cleanest of breaks will deliver the impossible sunlit uplands of the hyper-Thatcherite world they want to construct, while blaming every reverse on pernicious Europeans.

Populism, as Donald Trump is discovering, does not survive long when extravagant promises turn into real hardship

Eventually, a government of the centre and left will emerge that will settle the issue and we will rejoin the EU, validated by a second public vote. Today’s young, a working class that has learned through experience what works and millions of naturalised EU citizens will build on the existing Remain vote to create an overwhelming majority – with imperial, Thatcherite fantasies left as the preserve only of the Spectator-reading classes. The only question is whether it will take two or 10 years.

This struggle begins now. Brexiters now control the Tory party, destined to be at the wrong end of hopelessly unfair trade deals with protectionist China and the US and helpless to address the mounting outrage in the country. Those who warn that a second referendum risks social unrest or that it will be characterised by the charge of betrayal should imagine the strains in Britain in just a few years’ time.

The cultural, economic and popular base for Brexit does not exist. Populism, as Donald Trump is discovering, does not survive long when extravagant promises turn into real hardship. It was only callow, second-rate political leadership, along with the malevolent genius of Nigel Farage exploiting fears of immigration, which delivered the transient Brexit majority. The reality will out.

Thus both for the immediate weeks – and the years – ahead, the Labour party has to stand by the terms of its painfully negotiated conference agreement: that if it can’t get a general election it must press for an economic relationship as close as possible to the EU and for a second referendum. The refusal to forcefully make the case for Europe, of which membership of the customs union and single market is part, or to make the case for the referendum, has created the vacuum allowing 14 Labour MPs to vote with the Conservatives – and 11 more to abstain, so trumping the brave 20 Tory MPs prepared to vote for the national interest. And now further Labour votes are to be secured by Theresa May’s cynical promise of a makeshift, minimal package for left-behind Britain.

MPs and trade union leaders involved in this betrayal should reflect on the recent proposals of the German coal exit commission. To compensate regions and towns facing the loss of mining in 2038 as the country moves to meet its climate change goals, Germany is to launch a €40bn 20-year programme of economic regeneration, a Marshall plan for its old industrial regions.

Making a parallel commitment here will be central to winning the second referendum that will eventually be declared. It will never come from Brexit Tories. Instead, it will come from a broad-based government of the centre and left, seeking to end the civil war in which the Tory right has embroiled us all.

Will the Corbyn faction now controlling the Labour party, so endemically hostile to Europe as part of its 19th-century socialist worldview, ever rise to this challenge? We now know it can’t. The mission is to persuade a majority of the British that their best interests lie in Europe and for that either the Labour party has to be reclaimed – or a new party born.

• Will Hutton is an Observer columnist