It’s one of Labour’s safest seats, where eight in 10 voted to remain in the EU, but students say the party’s equivocations on a second poll is denting their support

Bristol West has become, in two short elections, one of Labour’s safest seats. Held by the LibDems until 2015, its student-heavy population turned decisively to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour in 2017, a year after registering the highest anti-Brexit vote for any seat outside London.

Thangam Debbonaire represents the constituency with an extraordinary 37,336 majority. Yet, the MP believes her margin could “just as easily disappear”, arguing she had a votes windfall in 2017 from people impressed by Corbyn, students angry about fees, sheer hostility to the Conservatives, and, of course, Brexit.

Labour grassroots step up anti-Brexit pressure on Jeremy Corbyn Read more

The question is whether that coalition of voters is fracturing amid Labour’s reluctance to articulate a position that is clearly anti-Brexit. A small group of students sitting in a Clifton cafe all insist they would not vote for Labour if there was a general election tomorrow, irritated, they say, by the party’s equivocations on the issue.

Nicky Tarran, 18, a first-year undergraduate studying French and German, is acutely frustrated he was too young to vote in the 2016 referendum. “Everyone in my year group, we had a political consciousness but we did not have a voice,” he says.

While he believes British politics is ultimately a choice between the Conservatives and Labour, he can’t bring himself to say he’d vote for the latter at the moment. “I agree that the Labour leadership needs to be more pro-European,” Tarran says. “I agree that Corbyn needs to change his mindset.” Above all, he wants Labour to “come out in support of a people’s vote”.

Not all of the group the Guardian spoke to are Labour supporters, but they are all left voters. Amy Heley, a fourth-year undergraduate, is active in the Our Future Our Choice pressure group, which supports a second referendum. She says she was “activated by Brexit”. Her arguments are rooted in a sense of disenfranchisement that would be familiar to many older Eurosceptics. “A lot of us can agree that a lot of people are angry about it,” she says. “We feel like the establishment is totally against us.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Labour’s Bristol West MP, Thangam Debbonaire, with Jeremy Corbyn in Bristol. Photograph: Chapman/LNP/REX/Shutterstock

Heley, however, is a Green party member, and is standing for the party in her home town of Brighton in May’s local council elections. “I was voting Green before but I could have been persuaded,” she says. Brexit was “the final straw” in persuading her to join the Green party, although she adds she would still prefer a Labour government if it came down to a choice between Corbyn’s Labour and Theresa May’s Conservatives.

Anti-Brexit activists and campaigners say there has been a stronger shift against Brexit in the area across all generations; quite a claim in a constituency that voted 79.7% in favour of remaining in the EU in the 2016 referendum.

Eileen Means, 67, who helped run a Bristol for Europe street stall in the city centre on Saturday, asked passersby to tick on a whiteboard whether they wanted to stay in the EU or not. Forty ticked yes, two don’t know and nobody dared tick no. “Judging by today’s response, Bristol has swung even more pro-EU,” Means concludes.

However, Debbonaire says her correspondence is more nuanced. She estimates that the overall 80/20 proportion is not much changed, even if she gets very little pressure in her inbox about leaving the EU.

She has become aware of other, less noisy, groups who think it might be worth endorsing May’s Brexit deal because they think some certainty is better than no deal. Debbonaire is thinking in particular of small traders, citing the example of a vintner that “buys all its wine from France and simply has no idea how it will manage”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nicky Tarran, Amy Heley, Max Langer and Sally Patterson from Bristol University. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/The Guardian

The MP, a junior whip, holds relatively close to Labour’s endlessly-restated formal position that May’s deal needs to be voted down, that the party needs to press for a general election, and then and only then can all options – including a second referendum – be considered.

She says she recognises labour needs to assert itself more strongly over Brexit, but she is unclear that a second referendum is the answer. “I’ve not seen any signs of a campaign that would win a referendum convincingly, which is what would be required to put the argument to bed.”

Others also wonder if a second referendum is too complex an answer when what they would like is to see is Britain remaining in the EU. Means, a former chair of Bristol Labour party, asks if it would not be better to simply revoke Article 50 “while we come together as a country”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bristol for Europe campaigner Sam Hickmott. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/The Guardian

Sam Hickmott, 20, a self-employed gardener who chairs Bristol for Europe, complains that Corbyn’s “job-first Brexit is a non-thing” arguing that you are “either in the EU or out of it and on the same boat as Theresa May or David Davis”.

Only Phil Jardine, 31, another member of Bristol for Europe and a member of the local Labour party, empathises with the party’s leadership dilemma, saying there is “no option which is a good option” because there are so many people elsewhere in the country who are Labour voters who wanted out.

Despite the wide range of views, Debbonaire remains popular in the constituency. Among the students in Clifton, Sally Patterson, the equality, liberation and access officer at the university’s students union, describes the MP as “one of my personal role models” who is “a listening MP”.

Although a Labour member, Patterson, 23, refuses to say she would vote for the party tomorrow because she is unhappy with the party’s Brexit equivocations. “I think what’s going on right now with the Labour leadership is dangerous,” she says. “This is not the party I signed up to, where the people would be listened to.”