It is undeniable that a faltering Europe causes an identity problem for Labour in a way that it does not for the Conservatives. Nor can this problem simply be resolved by inserting the word “reformed” before the EU. In the current crisis, Labour’s blind attachment to Europe seems like a house built on sand. There are few pro-Europeans who now positively cite the EU as a bastion of modernity or a progressive response to globalisation. As the migrants push the notion of a borderless continent to the brink, the member states retreat back into their default nationalist mentality.

Left-wing Eurosceptic stalwarts Kate Hoey, Graham Stringer and Gisela Stuart are leading the campaign for Leave although much of their energy has been channelled into airing their frustrations with the party. “Why are we storming the barricades to be on the side of the FTSE 100?” Stuart has legitimately asked, concluding that Labour has “mislaid its radical roots”. It is outside parliament that the loudest left-wing anti-EU voices can be heard. The Guardian’s editorial position may be to Remain but its commentators do not seem to be toeing the line, with Giles Fraser, Suzanne Moore, George Monbiot and even Owen Jones all at least flirting with Brexit. Theirs is a reluctant position born not out of a long-held suspicion of the EU or even domestic concerns, but events in southern Europe.

Appalled by the eurozone budgets concocted by unelected officials and imposed on a democracy like Greece, they are beginning to talk of the EU as a capitalist conspiracy that aids and assists the banking system and promotes policies that protect and promote international trade and finance at the cost of democracy. While the Right targets the bureaucrats in Brussels, the Left prefers to man-mark the bankers in Frankfurt. Those that demonstrate solidarity with Syriza and Popular Unity in Greece and Podemos in Spain, do so as if they were colonial liberation movements with Germany as the heavy-handed imperial force.

Tony Benn once dubbed EU treaties as a “cast-iron manifesto for capitalism” in the way that they had generated the perfect conditions for free movement of trade, capital, goods, services and people. Back in 1975, Benn was dubbed the “minister of fear” for his apocalyptic predictions that continual EEC membership would mean rising food prices and loss of trade and jobs. Seventies Euroscepticism was essentially a retreat into protectionist socialism. Likewise, today there are those that argue that leaving the EU is the only way to save Britain from corporatist Europe. An EU which has made it illegal to expand state ownership of business and is rushing through the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is not a mechanism through which the socialist utopia can be realised.

One man who until recently took this view is Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour leader once said that the project “has always been to create a huge free-market Europe, with ever-limiting powers for national parliaments and an increasingly powerful common foreign and security policy”. (You will not be able to read his full analysis as his aides have conveniently deleted all Corbyn’s anti-EU speeches from his website.)