It is entirely understandable that as the European vision became more progressive the Labour party came to embrace it. Jacques Delors’ speech to the TUC conference in 1988 was a turning point, not because the unions saw the EU as a way of halting Thatcherism or as a vehicle of pan-European socialism but rather its potential as a European-wide corporatism to cope with the forces of globalisation. Thatcher’s policy had been to allow unprofitable nationalised industries to fail, and through legislation to undermine the unions’ ability to fight back. Delors’ EU alternative was a place where unions and employers would work collectively to create conditions for European labour and capital to thrive in the world’s markets. He also promised to alleviate the impact of deindustrialisation through the restructuring of urban and rural regions and tackling long-term and youth unemployment. After the battles and defeats of the Thatcher years, it is little wonder that the union leaders salivated at the thought of beer and sandwiches in Brussels.

Delors, though, said little about how his plan compromised state sovereignty and democracy. This was a theme Margaret Thatcher was determined to address weeks later in a speech at Bruges on Belgian soil. She appeared to wake up to the fact that signing the Single European Act two years earlier had not been an unmixed blessing, and delivered the killer line which sent every hot-headed small-state Conservative into a frenzy: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them re-imposed at a European level.” By the mid-1990s, the transformation was complete. Labour had acquired its most pro-European leader in history, Tony Blair, while its Eurosceptic former leader Neil Kinnock settled into life in Brussels as a European Commissioner. Meanwhile William Hague took up the cross of the Tory Maastricht martyrs and allowed the issue of Britain’s membership of the euro to define his leadership. The party battle lines of the European debate were drawn for the next decade.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, international socialism in Britain seamlessly morphed into a rather bland form of Euro-internationalism. Blair’s pledge to put Britain “at the heart of Europe” was essentially borrowed from the SDP and inspired by his mentor Roy Jenkins. Under New Labour, EU membership was sold as Britain’s modern destiny. We were to be part of a club that was prosperous and progressive and enabled us finally to shed our imperial baggage and silence our “two World Wars, one World Cup” bravado. A few scrapes put a dent in this vision — notably Gordon Brown’s block on joining the euro and Blair’s foreign wars — but to this day this consensus remains remarkably intact within the party, despite it being out of date and out of touch with a significant proportion of Labour voters who oppse mass EU immigration. It was only with Brown’s infamous encounter with that “bigoted woman” Gillian Duffy that some began to realise that Labour’s core supporters were not quite as enthusiastic about the EU as party insiders. But they failed to address it, allowing UKIP to capitalise five years later.