Let me warn you right away that this column is trivial. Or rather, it’s about what is deemed trivial, which is a topic now under discussion at the highest levels of government. Even before gathering her cabinet ministers on Tuesday, Theresa May let it be known she would order them to focus on planning for Britain to leave Europe without a deal. Any business deemed “non-essential” would be junked.

This raises a fundamental question. Who decides what matters? One prime minister’s “non-urgent” issue could be a matter of life or death for a homeless person. Amber Rudd’s priorities won’t match those of someone whose benefits have just been cut off.

Yet there is a world beyond Brexit. True, it lacks the frenzied drama of cabinet walkouts, prime ministerial straw-clutching or humiliation served cold in Brussels. But things still happen – it’s just that they haven’t won much attention. It has been a good month to bury bad news. So allow me to disinter some of the headlines deep inside the newspapers.

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Since we’re counting small things, let’s start with children. Last week it was reported that a primary school in Great Yarmouth had opened its own food bank. It was launched by the headteacher, Debbie Whiting, after she saw pupils under 11 so hungry they were stealing from others’ lunchboxes. This week, more than half of teachers surveyed by the National Education Union expressed fears that some of their kids won’t have enough to eat this Christmas. They reported a boy turning up wearing his trousers back to front, in order to hide the holes in the knees, and a class where one in three children sleep in their uniforms because they have no pyjamas.

If anything qualifies as a national emergency, it should be this. A new generation growing up without adequate food and clothing ought to be leading TV bulletins and shaming government ministers into action. What dominates instead is blue-on-blue match commentary, because Jacob Rees-Mogg is box office while poor people can be slipped in just before the “And finally”.

It is not just that this high political crisis sucks up all the oxygen – it’s that broadcasters and newspapers use it as an excuse to spin the same old Westminster bubble story. “It’s like a mad computer game!” fizzed Andrew Marr last month. Except it’s not. It’s real, with big consequences, and it will drag on way past anyone’s bedtime.

The political class’s abject failure has opened the door to all manner of mad ideas

More news. Last weekend a Leeds-based charity supporting local sex workers said that many of the women they helped have been driven on to the streets because of problems with their universal credit, or to top up pensions. Charity worker Amber Wilson told the Huffington Post that she’d heard of women selling sex for cash to buy Christmas presents for their families.

What saddens me is not those details so much as the sheer number of times I have heard their like while reporting this decade of austerity. From Preston to Plymouth, those hollowed-out local economies and eviscerated public services formed the breeding ground for much of the vote to leave the EU. Whatever it meant for John Redwood or Daniel Hannan, for many voters I and other reporters met, the referendum was nothing to do with Irish backstops or custom unions or WTO rules. It wasn’t even necessarily about Europe. It was a whole beehive of frustrations, shoved through a crude binary: in or out, yes or no. And many people who had previously always voted for the red rosette looked at their lives, ignored for decades by the political and media classes, and thought: no.

“We hear you!” promised Andy Burnham as leave swept region after region that summer night. After the vote, there was hair-pulling and chest-beating, concerned columns and politicians’ speeches. As May vowed: “A change is gonna come.” Except it didn’t. And two years later we’re back to ignoring the lived experience of whole swathes of the population.

That carelessness runs through many of today’s arguments for holding a second referendum. When some well-lunched eminence chunters on about Brexit being an act of “monumental self-harm”, do they ever think how that sounds to someone who’s been harmed year after year by waiting months for an operation, by a care service that’s falling to bits, by the lack of police to follow up local muggings? The same goes for those homilies about how “no one voted to make themselves poorer”. Well, no one voted for their factories to shut and the council to bend over backwards to bring in some distribution warehouse with a bunch of minimum wage jobs, but that’s what they got.

The results of that regional write-off barely ever make the headlines, yet they shape today’s news. Take another story you may have missed, from last month: statisticians now calculate that, throughout the Brexit campaign, even while the UK’s economy was powering ahead of the rest of the G7, as George Osborne boasted, the north-east was actually in recession. Sure enough, from Stockton-on-Tees to South Tyneside they voted to leave, and by stonking majorities. How has the government tried to close the gap? It hasn’t. Research published this month showed that total public spending across the north has plunged more than £6bn since 2010, even while the south-east and the south-west have seen a rise of £3bn.

Let us connect these stories back to the Brexit catastrophe. With Westminster locked in stalemate, Britain now stands on the brink of a second referendum. If it takes that step, I can make two sure bets. First, the prospect of a stolen vote will cause uproar. Second, in any rerun, Labour will play a central role. As John McDonnell confirmed to me last month, Labour will fight for remain – and he and Jeremy Corbyn will be scrutinised on a daily basis for their commitment and enthusiasm. With fat chance of converting those Telegraph-reading retirees along the English Riviera from Brexit, the battle will be won or lost in those Labour heartlands that went leave, such as south Wales and the north-east.

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There can’t be any offer to voters of vote again, plebs, and this time get it right. Tony Blair and those other beached whales of British politics can’t be let near the campaign: these people need only open their mouths to lose whichever argument they want to make. Instead, remain politicians will have to say: we know you voted for change, and we promise you’ll get it. Big-money policies will be needed to counter the sense that to be born poor in one of the richest societies in human history is to be jailed in disadvantage, that the state under austerity has become an instrument of punishment, and that public money is often handed to those who least need or deserve it.

If parliamentary maths makes a general election unlikely, then a second referendum in which remain stands even a chance must still make a Labour offer to Labour voters. To address the resentment that fed much of the 2016 vote, remain would have to admit that many people across Britain have been overlooked for far too long and promise major investment, coupled with a shift in power away from Westminster and the market, and towards local democracy.

The political class’s abject failure has opened the door to all manner of mad ideas. By all means, count this as another. But if we do end up with a referendum, I can’t see any way for remain to secure a convincing victory, apart from to present itself as not the incumbent but the insurgent, not the status quo but the radicals. And how will the Tories squatting in Downing Street ever do that, apart from agreeing with their foe Jeremy Corbyn a means of getting his policies on to the statute books?

• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

• This article was amended on 21 December 2018 to address some confusion between Plymouth and Portsmouth