Saturday morning, and Stevenage appears to be bracing itself for a riot. Police cars block off road after road. Sirens scythe the air. Officers hurry about in hi-vis. And at the eye of this storm is not some motley crew of furious insurgents, but hundreds of children and mums and dads, marching last weekend to save the school they love.

“We are a small town and we aren’t used to staging demonstrations,” says councillor Josh Bennett Lovell, which explains both the law-and-order overkill and the bright-eyed kids enjoying all the excitement of a big day out. Only when the marchers hit the town square does the carnival spirit give way to speeches highlighting the seriousness of their situation.

Should these fighters lose, on Friday the Barclay school will be handed over to an academy trust based 35 miles away in central London that has, they say, barely shown its face at the secondary, let alone talked to staff or parents. That will be despite months of protest by the head and governors, a series of strikes by teachers, packed meetings with worried locals, and parents and children taking to the streets. Into the mic roars Pete Hawkins: “We want to work with a partner, not have a dictatorship come in!”

With that plaintive shout, the father of two Barclay pupils not only captures this cause, he also shows up the bogus politics that has stalked this country for over two and a half years. How many times have you heard that Brexit is about taking back control, about throwing off shackles made in Brussels and embracing homegrown democracy? Even if that means ministers flirting with the idea of introducing martial law, contracting a ferry service with no ferries or turning a motorway into a lorry park. Anything goes in government today, provided it is done with full ceremonial lip service to the will of the people – the very same people, of course, who the entire political class has spent decades ignoring.

Then on an ice-cold Saturday morning along come some of the most ignored people in British politics – residents of a taken-for-granted satellite town – to point out that what’s happening to their school is more undemocratic and untransparent and unfair than any number of Eurocrat directives, and it is entirely the creation of the British state.

Because Barclay got a poor Ofsted report two and a half years ago, the government will forcibly turn it into an academy. Which trust it is handed to is determined solely by a Whitehall civil servant. Neither the local authority, nor the school governors, nor the staff – and least of all the parents and pupils – get any say in the process. This is the lawful regime, as set by former education secretary turned defender of democracy Michael Gove.

The school was first paired up with a local trust, Herts for Learning, until the government suddenly changed its mind for reasons never properly explained to anyone at Barclay. The Department for Education told me on Monday that the trust – formerly part of Hertfordshire county council’s school improvement service – was “concerned” about its “capacity to absorb the school”. The trust’s head, Alex Thomas, vehemently denies this and says he would take the school tomorrow if he could.

Instead, the school was awarded last March to Future Academies trust (Fat), based in central London. In minutes of a meeting released under freedom of information, civil servants admitted to the school that there was no formal process in making the decision. There was “no list” of who had been approached and “no documented evidence”. In this hasty ad hoc fashion the future of nearly 900 pupils was decided – and a 70-year-old public asset, with plenty of land and its own Henry Moore sculpture, was given away.

Once a school becomes an academy, it is effectively privatised. Taxpayer money is still pumped in, but it is removed from local democratic oversight. So from Friday, Fat will control everything from uniform to the hours of the school to staff pay. People at the school say they don’t have a clue what the trust will do – because they have been told nothing. The first meeting staff and parents will have with Fat representatives will be after they have started running the school. When governors met the trust’s boss, Paul Smith, last September, I’m told he was asked about plans for curriculum, for governance – and at the end of the two-and-a-half hour long sessions, governors said he had provided them with no clarity, no specifics. (I did ask Fat about this and other issues in a set of detailed questions, but it did not respond.) Smith has been clear that he works to an 80/20 model, where only 20% of his policies are “negotiable”. At other Fat schools, whose staff I’ve spoken to, that means longer school days and compulsory Latin lessons from age 11.

The driving forces behind Fat are Lord and Lady Nash. John Nash’s background is not in schools but in private equity. He has given hundreds of thousands of pounds to the Conservative party, which ennobled him and made him Gove’s academies minister. During that time, you might think, he would have avoided any question of conflict of interest by giving up his own academy trust. He did not.

This isn’t democracy. This is a stitch-up. And far from the situation changing after 29 March, the likes of Nash will probably get more schools. Parents have appealed to their local MP to intervene. The Conservative Stephen McPartland posts open letters about how, as a democrat, he believes in pursuing Brexit. But the will of the people when they’re his constituents? Forget about it. When a parent raised her concerns two weeks ago, his response was to tell her to move her daughter to a school in Bedfordshire.

The MP didn’t respond to any questions I put, nor did I see him at Saturday’s march. Does he care that schoolchildren were carrying placards reading “I HEART Mr Allchorn”, the new head, who is working wonders? I don’t imagine the DfE cares too much that the school is scoring the best A-levels and GCSEs in years and has won plaudits from Ofsted for its “turnaround”. I suppose that Nash and his trust, waiting in the wings, will claim the credit for the hard work already done to transform a failing school.

This entire episode shows you where the true democratic deficit lies in Britain. Not between Westminster and Brussels, but between Westminster and the rest of us. And sometimes it takes a community school to teach us that lesson. Well done to the parents and teachers of Stevenage: they call you a dormitory town, but at least you’re not taking this outrage lying down.

• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist