The UK is reassessing the terms of its relationship with the EU. Photo: Toby Melville / PA Wire/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.As the UK faces the turbulence of Brexit, many progressives are finding it difficult to respond. Controversy swirls around Jeremy Corbyn’s call, now apparently withdrawn, for an immediate invoking of Article 50. A more open embrace of Brexit has come, however, from the the crowdsourcing campaign organisation 38 Degrees, which claims to be ‘one of the UK's biggest campaigning communities, with over 2.5 million members’: people who ‘take action’ by voting on online petitions - they don’t pay subscriptions, but “share a desire for a more progressive, fairer, better society”.
At the beginning of the EU referendum campaign, 38 Degrees opted for a position of neutrality between Remain and Leave. 230,000 ‘members’, or 9 per cent of the claimed membership, voted, with 52 per cent of these opting for neutrality. The office designed the ‘neutral’ option as using ‘people power to cut through the spin on both sides – and give voters the chance to get the real facts’. By dressing up neutrality as ‘people power’, they steered members towards avoiding a potentially damaging division in 38 Degrees (only 28 per cent of those voting backed Remain and 13 per cent Leave).
