The audience for the BBC’s Question Time programme is not a random sample or intended to reflect accurately the views of UK voters. But in recent weeks it’s become an influential part of the Brexit debate, because of the obvious strength of feeling among the raucous Brexiteers in the audience.

Politicians and journalists who spend too much of their time preaching to the converted on social media, have been visibly shocked by the raw passions of the no-dealers who, in England at least, appear to believe that Brexit is a test of national virility – a proxy war with Brussels, which must be won whatever the sacrifice.

Advocates of a People's Vote, and sympathetic Labour MPs have been losing confidence. The opinion polls suggest that there has been a drift towards Remain among voters, but analysts like Professor John Curtice aren’t convinced that this is a solid and sustainable change in opinion, or that the UK would welcome a repeat referendum. Labour frontbenchers, like the shadow housing minister Melanie Onn, now say they would resign if Jeremy Corbyn were to back a People's Vote. Her view appears to be gaining ground in Labour, with pro-Corbyn commentators like Owen Jones now positively hostile.

People's Vote campaigners, led by the Tory MP Sarah Wollaston, have abandoned attempts to table a People's Vote amendment to this Tuesday’s multi-option Commons debate, blaming Jeremy Corbyn for refusing to endorse it. There's a profound irony, not only in a Tory MP expressing more accurately the pro-Remain views of most Labour members, but also in Corbyn failing to support the grass-roots majority in his own party.

Some still hope that a People's Vote might pop up as a last resort as Britain tips over the hard Brexit cliff in two months' time. But it seems to be fear of the bald-headed men of Brexit, not romantic reactionaries like Jacob Rees-Mogg, that’s halted Labour’s pivot to a repeat referendum.

One of the few liberal-left journalists who gets out of the London metropolitan bubble, The Guardian’s John Harris, has also been taking the temperature of provincial Brexit and he too is worried. Something has stirred in the psyche of England. “No-dealism”, he says, has tapped into a centuries-old urge to rebel against authority and kick over the traces. “To indulge in futile and inexplicable gestures, evident in everything from 18th-century riots to 1970s punk rock, and perfectly summed up," Harris says, “by Johnny Rotten, in Anarchy in the UK: ‘Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it’.”

Many of those florid working-class Brexiteers, dismissed as “gammon” by millennials, were probably present at the birth of punk rock. They may even have pogoed to the Sex Pistols, the Clash or other radical icons of that most political era of popular music. Punk grew out of the same frustration experienced by Brexit left-behinds: “No Future.” It was lapped up by the left back in the day, the aggression of its exponents seen as a sign of vigour and immediacy. Now it doesn’t look so cool.

The liberal left – of which I confess to being a member – likes to think it has a monopoly on radicalism. We’re inclined to dismiss Brexiteers as racists and deplorables (which some of them are), rather than as people fighting what they see as a war against the destruction of their way of life.

John Harris thinks that much of the fervour of the no-dealers is down to toxic masculinity. The people who howl down Remainers on Question Time do tend to be men – like those burly types who barracked the Tory Remain MP Anna Soubry outside Westminster.

But then, aficionados and practitioners of punk rock tended to be aggressively male also, as were the men who led the miners' strike and anti-poll tax demos. Let’s face it: militant radicalism is pretty damn male.

Since the millennium, a new kind of social apartheid has divided Britain and fractured the old male class solidarity of the seventies. The educated, urban intelligentsia, with its diversity and multiculturalism, has lost touch with small-town England, with its awkward nationalism.

There’s little sympathy on Twitter for socially conservative communities, who’ve seen their jobs disappear and their living standards eroded, but show little interest in transgender toilet arrangements or the gender pay gap in the BBC.

Of course, the fact that many supporters of Brexit have legitimate grievances doesn’t make leaving the European Union with no deal (or even May’s deal) any more sensible or rational. Punk nihilism is no principle upon which to conduct relations with our biggest trading partners. But the left has a job to do explaining why a People's Vote would help these people. This is not helped by lectures on Remain from Tony Blair, interviewed live from Davos, the playground of the global corporate elite.

There has been a tendency on the left to claim that Brexit has all been got up by selfish and mean-minded billionaires and capitalists conning clueless middle-Englanders. This is at variance with reality. It is surely corporate Britain – the CBI, Goldman Sachs, the Bank of England, Jaguar Land Rover, HSBC, who are the most vociferous opponents of a no-deal Brexit.

Global capitalism created the European Union in its image. Margaret Thatcher helped devise the European Single Market. Tony Blair is its PR man.

This doesn’t make the European Union a bad thing, any more than free trade is a bad thing. Not everything to do with corporate capitalism, or what goes on in Davos for that matter, is to be reviled as neoliberal greed. A borderless Europe helps Nissan, Sony and Airbus, but it also suits young millennials who want to work and study freely abroad. Davos plutocrats spend much of their time agonising about climate change and devising philanthropic schemes to defeat malaria and poverty in the developing world.

No-one in the Brexit debate has a monopoly on morality, or wisdom. To repeat: I cannot see any sense in Britain leaving the biggest free-trade area on the planet for no deal, or any form of Brexit. I would vote Remain in any People's Vote – though I fear now that this is not going to happen.

I deplore the aggressive, overbearing and occasionally racist behaviour of many Brexiteers. But I get equally fed up with liberal metropolitans who seem to recognise injustice only when it applies to ethnic or sexual minorities. This culture war makes reconciliation, as called for by Mrs Windsor, infinitely more difficult.

On Tuesday, MPs may vote for a delay in Article 50, without any clear idea of what they want to do with it. If Labour won’t pivot to a People's Vote, then MPs must find a compromise. If they don’t, then Theresa May’s botched deal could be the only one left standing. What a dismal outcome that would be, if MPs end up endorsing a bad blind Brexit because they haven’t the will to achieve a better one.

The bawheids of Brexit will have won – though they may not realise it.