Diary – 17 January 2019

A few of us on the Labour left decide to see if it is possible to conjure, from nowhere, a #FinalSay campaign for a second referendum. The Labour front bench does not sound ecstatic about a second referendum, and Chuka Umunna’s lot are bound to screw it up if they’re in charge. So we schedule a meeting in the Commons, commission a meme and spread the word. Not long after this goes public, numerous Twitter users with random numbers in their handles begin accusing me of being a ‘pro-Nato White Helmet shill’, a ‘coup-monger’ and a ‘neoliberal’. The reaction at my Labour branch is more positive. We pass a motion calling for an emergency party conference to decide the line in any second referendum. Our MP, pro-Brexiteer Kate Hoey, does not attend. Ms Hoey’s positions on Northern Ireland, Brexit, urban cyclists and fox-hunting are at odds with those of the average young professional in Lambeth. In fact, the only local resident I know who supports her position on the foxes is my dog.

I fly to Berlin on Germanwings. This is like Ryanair without the extravagant luxuries. My hosts allocate me a hotel room with a mattress the thickness and consistency of a McDonald’s bun. Just out of the window, across the Alexanderplatz, the old Park Inn glowers, notorious for hosting communist apparatchiks in the heyday of the DDR. Today it’s the capitalist business hotel chains that specialise in soul-draining bleakness. I’m here to give a talk commemorating the life and work of Rosa Luxemburg, the Marxist economist and party leader murdered by a right-wing militia in January 1919 after taking part in an abortive uprising. We gather in the scruffy but endearing Roter Salon, a bar in the Volksbühne theatre, which still has the low-rent atmosphere of the Weimar Republic.