When you can’t ask for much, it’s a good idea to ask for something you really want. And there lies the risk for pro-Europeans in the demand for a national vote on the terms of Britain’s exit from the EU, as chosen by the Liberal Democrats at their conference this week as a flagship policy.

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There are impeccable reasons to resist the kind of tyre-screeching flight from Europe preferred by the Brexit ultras. It can also be argued that total rupture was not specified on the ballot paper, and that such a grave decision needs layers of consent. But it’s hard to imagine a campaign that urges leave voters to see the error of their ways prevailing over any deal Theresa May might negotiate. The offer of moving on would easily beat the offer of turning back the clock.

Electoral defeat evacuates stores of political capital, and Europhiles have to consider whether they want to spend their pennies on the sourest political grapes in the shop. The Lib Dems are aware of that hazard. Former business secretary Vince Cable voiced his concern at the conference. Even Tim Farron’s allies concede that the prospect of a second referendum is of value largely as a rhetorical symbol of dissent.

There is tactical logic here: 48% of voters rejected Brexit – six times more than the Lib Dems attract. Millions of pro-Europeans are poorly represented. Labour is busy broadcasting a political colonoscopy, offering voters a tour of its internal pathologies. Tory liberals will not defy their new leader on EU matters before suspicion that she despises them is confirmed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Farron’s uncomplicated position is a poll-rating defibrillator, an emergency device to restore a pulse, not a long-term remedy.’ Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Not all remain voters are rigid with terror at the prospect of Brexit, desperate for politicians to stand up and scream “no”, but that constituency has the numbers to lift the Lib Dems back into third-party contention, back into the game. Farron’s uncomplicated position – against leaving the EU, for returning if we leave – is a poll-rating defibrillator, an emergency device to restore a pulse, not a long-term remedy.

Farron also has to listen to his members. Thousands joined after the referendum, and not because they were relaxed about the outcome. This is a party whose activists drape a giant blue and gold EU flag across the dancefloor at their conference disco. Debate on a second plebscite aired doubts, but defiance was the theme. Didn’t Nigel Farage say that if the result were close, there should be a rerun? Wasn’t the leave proposition criminally mis-sold – fictional millions for the NHS; imminent Turkish invasion? Don’t lies invalidate the mandate?

To Europe’s radical right, 23 June was an inspiration – an incitement to slash harder at the ties of solidarity

If remain had won, the leavers would indeed have cried establishment stitch-up and demanded a rematch, cribbing their strategy from Scottish nationalists who wasted no time moulding their defeat on independence into new grievance, stretching a 45% minority into a moral majority. Many Brexiters were hoping for an electoral martyrdom along those lines. They pace nervily around their unexpected trophy, which turns out to be tarnished with a duty to deliver the impossible.But in Scotland, it was the status quo (or a close variant) that won. It was easy to present the result as a stage in the spread of nationalist consciousness, with contagion to the rest of the country just a matter of time. In the vote on Britain’s EU membership, the status quo was sentenced to death. Even if it could be shown that millions of leave voters were wracked with buyers’ remorse (it can’t), the union they might rejoin will never be the one they asked to quit.

The referendum is already altering Europe’s political geometry. The shock of British rejection is changing debates around integration and immigration. Next spring, Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Front National, will almost certainly make it into the final round of a French presidential election. The Eurosceptic, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland party is poised to enter Germany’s parliament for the first time next autumn. Nationalist and populist movements are thriving across Europe. Governments in Poland and Hungary are developing anti-liberal doctrines on a model borrowed from Vladimir Putin. To Europe’s radical right, 23 June was a provocation and an inspiration – an incitement to slash harder at the ties of continental solidarity. The idea that moderate leaders in Paris or Berlin will sit with their engines idling while Britain ponders whether to join the convoy and at what speed is delusional.

No one is more in denial about this than the Tory Brexiteers who skim over the detail of their mission as if leafing through the brochure for a pleasure cruise around the Commonwealthtoasting free trade deals on a recommissioned Britannia. They treat practical questions about their agenda and concern that their campaign fuelled xenophobic fires as the sore losers’ whinge.

In truth, they are sore winners. Many resent the burden of political maturity that comes with getting their way. They keep in their pockets the card showing May’s quiet support for remain, ready to play it with a flourish when her first compromise with reality can be cast as betrayal. But it is hard for pro-Europeans to denounce that game while drenched in nostalgia, when the argument sounds like a plan to build a time-machine and return to the late 90s, back to the days when Brussels-phobia was but a yolk-stain on the tie of unelectable Tory reaction.

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Lib Dems insist that their position is more nuanced than that, but nuance hasn’t exactly been flying off the shelves in the retail end of British politics recently. A position that lends itself to caricature as contempt for the will of the people will be cast that way.

Britain needs a liberal promise of engagement with Europe that absorbs the result of the referendum, and European liberals need British partners who will engage with their dilemmas on post-referendum terms. I understand why Farron is not ready to plunge his party into that mission without first underlining its anti-Brexit credentials. The Lib Dems are enfeebled, trying to build polling bulk. Undiluted remania is the only available political protein. Building a platform from which pro-Europeans can launch a bid to shape the future –one to rival the flimsy, retrograde prospectus of the militant sceptics is not a task that a shrunken liberal party can easily undertake alone. Sadly, as things stand, they have no choice but to try.