On January 29, parliament rejected the Cooper Amendment – which would have staved off a no-deal Brexit. Less than 24 hours later, in a room overlooking Shoreditch, a huddle of London technology workers are planning their next move to stop Britain leaving the European Union. There are about twenty people: most of them are men, some of them are fiddling with laptops or smartphones. There is a long boardroom table strewn with cookies; later, someone will bring a stack of pizzas with salami and mixed vegetables.
Sitting at the narrow end of the table, Mike Butcher, editor-at-large of the UK edition of TechCrunch and unofficial numen of London’s tech scene, explains what’s going on. This is a Tech For UK meet-up. Here, people from every nook and cranny of Britain’s technology industry come together to build digital tools. Their function? Block Brexit, of course.
The Tech For UK crowd is comprised of startup founders, developers, recruiters, marketing experts, social media strategists. They might have joined out of simple pro-EU sentiments, and/or out of worry for Brexit’s impact not only on their lives, but on their livelihoods and businesses. They have seen how VCs stopped liking the UK; they are fretting about European innovation grants drying up, or European tech workers talking about moving somewhere else; some of them are European citizens themselves. Dismayed by the fatalistic comportment of official trade organisations, these people congealed into an unofficial pro-Remain guerrilla operation, determined to use their skills to make the Brexit train stall before it goes flying over the white cliffs of Dover. As Butcher puts it, this is an exercise in “civic technology.”
Butcher, an affable, bespectacled man with a pinched voice and a liking for pinstriped waistcoats and leather jackets, goes on to enumerate some of the products the group has created over its almost twelve months of operations: Compare the Brexit, a website detailing how every single shade of Leave will wreak havoc on different areas of British society; myeu.uk, an interactive map designed to answer the Monty Pythonesque question “What has the EU ever done for us?”; and Finalsay, an app pro-EU citizens can use to cajole their MP via vocal notes.
“We don’t do Monday-morning quarterbacking,” Butcher says. “We have to get shit done.”
The objective, now, is targeting the Leave-backing Labour MPs who scuppered the Cooper amendment, and showing them that the public mood has shifted from supporting Brexit to opposing it. The implicit assumption is that the Labour Party will soon stop prevaricating, and back a second referendum. But in order for that proposal to make it through parliament nearly all Labour MPs must be swayed into supporting it.
The regular way to do that would be send those MPs a bunch of constituent emails or letters. But a lot of tepid yet Remain-backing people can’t be bothered to look up their MP’s email, and facilitating that by setting up a website that sends out pre-filled emails won’t cut it: MPs consider such messages as campaigning material, and bin them. That’s why Tech For UK must find a way to make it easier for constituents to send messages to their MPs, and in the same time make those messages appear more personalised, forcing MPs to answer them.
Someone proposes creating a platform to send out personalised postcards. Another attendee says that the idea sounds a great deal like what Moonpig does. Someone else asks the question that has been echoing through tech ventures’ meeting rooms since the launch of the Mosaic web browser in 1993. “How do we make this scalable?”
Butcher first got involved in politics during the 2017 election campaign. A passionate Remainer, he soon crossed paths with Best for Britain, an anti-Brexit pressure group that counted Gina Miller among its spokespeople, and which was then conducting a tactical vote campaign to thwart Theresa May’s hard-Brexit plans.
“I noticed that one thing Best for Britain needed was an ecosystem of tech people around it, to help more with its campaigning,” Butcher says. He took it on himself to involve key technology personalities in anti-Brexit initiatives; in March 2018, Tech For UK was launched.
Since then, the organisation has been working as Best for Britain’s skunkworks. Its members meet periodically in the offices of sympathetic tech companies, including betting exchange Smarkets and workspace provider Knotel. Ideas for campaigning tools are hatched, stress-tested, and then pitched to Best for Britain – which provides the wherewithal for development and roll-out of the ideas it likes the most. (Butcher says that most of the work going into the creation of Tech For UK’s tools is donated, and that Best for Britain’s funding has been confined to limited amounts.)
Naturally, it is a two-way relationship. At Tech For UK’s following meet-up, on February 10, Best for Britain CEO Eloise Todd is sitting next to Butcher, providing a rundown of what is happening in Westminster, which helps focus the attendees’ minds on the battles ahead.
Todd stresses the importance of building tools to help ordinary citizens “show their MP that there is enthusiasm to stay in the EU”. Alongside the postcard project, another idea starts taking shape: a website to automatically print pro-EU posters on Valentine’s Day, the day of a key Brexit debate. The poster should be personalised depending on the user’s location, but Butcher and Todd emphasise that that should be the only modifiable detail: what if pro-Brexit activist hijacked the poster’s open template to mock Remainers? “We don’t want to produce tools for the other side,” Butcher says.
The eight people partaking in this Sunday morning get-together start listing their skills: most of them are proficient in Javascript, only one person can code in Python. A product manager volunteers to direct the development of the poster-making website. People split up into two working groups, and set about building the two tools they hope will help stop Brexit.
Butcher and Todd are pretty optimistic that can happen, whether through a public vote, or a parliamentary vote. Best for Britain’s research – conducted jointly with anti-racist charity Hope not Hate – shows that the “will of the people” has now turned against leaving the EU, both in absolute terms and constituency-wise. The key thing is providing people with effective, digital ways to express their stance.
“Our main objective right now is to make sure that [Theresa May’s Brexit] deal is voted down,” Todd says. That, she says, will most likely result in a Brexit delay, and, hopefully, a second referendum. She does not believe that May’s defeat will result in a no-deal Brexit, especially after the adoption of the Spelman amendment made crystal clear that a majority of MPs are against a cliff edge scenario. “This government has [it] entirely in their hands to stop no deal,” she says.
Shortly after Tech for UK’s launch in March 2018, Butcher managed to rope in 80 British technology CEOs to sign an open letter calling for a second EU referendum. Over the next few months, the number of signatories ballooned: today, the letter has over 1,150 backers.
When it comes to Brexit, Butcher says, Tech For UK is pretty attuned with the prevalent worldview of Britain’s technology industry. “Most of the technology industry voted for Remain,” he says. “It's a highly diverse industry, it's highly international, and [halting] freedom of movement will drastically affect startups.”
Tech For UK’s vocal anti-Brexit activism contrasts with the attitude of another organisation with a slightly different name: techUK the official trade body of British technology companies. Contrary to Tech For UK, techUK seems to have largely accepted that Brexit will happen, and has come out in favour of May’s deal, while vehemently rejecting leaving with no deal.
A survey the organisation conducted in the run-up to the “meaningful vote” in January, found that 51 percent of its members supported holding another referendum as their favourite fall-back option in case parliament rejected May’s deal. The organisation did not enquire on its membership's favoured outcome regardless of the fate of May’s deal – and more in general keeps maintaining a pro-deal approach.
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“We clearly supported Remain, but our members are of the idea that [Brexit] is going to happen,” says Giles Derrington, techUK’s associate director of policy. “On most policy objectives [May's deal] is broadly acceptable – while no deal is an absolute disaster.”
“Ultimately, our members aren't asking us to solve Brexit, but to support their business.”
Butcher argues that other considerations might be at play. “techUK represents much larger companies that have the budget to be able to deal with Brexit,” he says. Most startup founders and budding innovators, he continues, won’t have the means to stave off the worst consequences of a UK exit – which would arguably explain why many of Tech For UK’s most dedicated regulars come from the startup scene.
Todd is adamant that, even as the country seems to be hysterically hurtling towards the March 29 deadline, there is no reason to stop fighting. ”If we leave the EU, there is a case to mitigate the deal,” she says. ”But, before we've left, why on Earth wouldn't you campaign for what most people in the UK now want?”
In December 2018, the author of this article moderated a panel event organised by Mike Butcher, receiving a payment of £200.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
