The privilege to air one’s views carries with it a duty to admit when you get it wrong. Weirdly, the most read article I wrote for this newspaper of late was a retort it generously allowed to what I saw as churlish coverage of the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. I don’t vote for political parties, but felt whatever groundswell installed Corbyn was worthy of interest.

I did vote to remain in Europe, expecting the result, but was surprised by Corbyn’s reticence between xenophobia and internationalism. I’ve lived on the continent, felt deracinated all my life, get by in three European languages and enjoy encounters that arise from practising them in Britain. I hoped the Labour party would choose internationalism over xenophobia.

Wrong, especially regarding the leader for whom the “fight starts now”, having already surrendered without striking a blow, even in vain. What fight? Certainly not for internationalism or the 48%, or 1.4 million British across the Channel, or 3 million Europeans, Corbyn suddenly discovers, who came here within their legal rights but now fear repulsive communication from the Home Office or Capita – and face de facto deportation. No need to recount Corbyn’s conjoining the race to the bottom of the xenophobic sewer. What matters is what his Labour party, apart from its few rebels, has done by supporting Brexit.

A tangent: I worked much of last year in Colombia, on a peace deal to end the world’s longest war, an initiative of President Juan Manuel Santos, who said: “My advisers asked me, ‘Are you willing to expend your political capital to do this?’ I said, ‘Yes. It would be worse to get to the end of my life and think I had the opportunity and didn’t take it.’” Imagine the Labour (or Tory) leadership thinking like that. You can’t, because they couldn’t. Santos narrowly lost a plebiscite, but believed the matter too important to accept it as conclusive. Millions filled the squares, defying the result; Santos reworked the accord and passed it through Congress. The peace perseveres.

David Cameron lacked that resolve and Theresa May mutated her views to ride the repugnant mood. That left Corbyn’s Labour in an interesting position: he could have “done a Santos”; fought Brexit tooth and nail on principle, focal point for the 48% that is now a majority, champion of open minds, of the economy, swaths of the working and middle classes who voted Remain; of business, academe, science, the NHS, Scotland and Northern Ireland, the Bank of England – with a fair wind from the supreme court. But no.

Corbyn had to toe the awful line: “will of the people!”, a tic of politicians with nothing interesting to say. Why did he buckle? Maybe he’s been in committee rooms so long that he cannot think beyond paragraph 6, clause 8, subsection 4. Maybe his vision is so myopically British that he cannot see beyond the white cliffs, although his wife is Mexican. Maybe he always hated the EU. Probably, Corbyn and his MPs want to appease xenophobia in Labour heartlands, at whatever price of principle, to keep their seats warm at Westminster.

The urgency is that 3 million people legitimately here are scared (or have no idea what’s about to hit them): serving spaghetti, brewing coffee, plastering walls and pulling pints; doctors, nurses, students, scientists, builders, brokers, the vast majority hard working and agreeable to have around. What’s the problem?

Corbyn’s – and most of his party’s – abrogation has contributed to a national culture whereby Brexit is less democratic decision than monolith. “Will of the people!”: we hear it from Labour too (though not its former leader, in his latest estimable effort), less democratic than fascistic, cudgel for anyone who dares suggest we betray not just Britain – never mind Ireland – but Europe and internationalism.

Thus, the crucial contrast to how the half of America that voted against Donald Trump reacts to the “will of the people”. “Resist!” reads Greenpeace’s banner over the White House. Where are our equivalents to those American public and popular dissidents trying to make a difference by making some noise? Answer, citing Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” This is a very British suicide.

Dmitri Shostakovich said of his opera The Nose that it was about “the appalling tyranny of the majority”. Among that majority, count the man who could have defied it and thereby defiles the term “leader of the opposition”, because that’s exactly what he’s not. If I defended Corbyn on these pages, I stand humbly corrected.