Chapters 1 and 2 traced, articulated and critically engaged with two distinct British left positions on Europe: one that supports what we have termed a market Europe and the other that opposes membership in any integrative project. The former owes much to the gradual accommodation to capitalism of the British left, particularly within the Labour Party. Labour's acquiescence peaked with its Third Way ideology that came to inform the turn to Blairism and New Labour. The latter, rooted in a left Euroscepticism, can be traced back to at least the 1970s and 1980s, led by prominent figures on the hard left and old right of Labour such as Tony Benn and Peter Shore. Such positions re-emerged amid Brexit in, respectively, elements of Corbynism and a more socially conservative Blue Labour.

To summarize, both perspectives – the former implicitly, the latter much more explicitly – tend to reject the idea that the EU can operate as an effective locus of resistance to the distributional costs of neoliberal globalization. The market Europe position understates the need for the EU to confront those costs, whereas the against Europe position places its faith in the British nation-state as the appropriate site of any such confrontation. In contrast to both, and without being naive about the challenges of reforming the extant EU, we suggest that sole reliance on the British state is a dead end for the left. The EU both can and should be repurposed, not only to manage but to actively ameliorate and sometimes resist the excesses of a globalization, which is in any case presently morphing into something different to what is conventionally thought of as the neoliberal variant (see Bishop & Payne 2021a). As such, the British left must, from our perspective, look beyond these two positions to shape its Europe policy. In so doing it must look to re-establish closer relations with the EU, especially European progressive parties and actors. But it should also actively develop a vision for Europe, including for reshaping the extant EU. While remaining clear-headed about the difficulties of such reform (discussed in Chapter 2), this chapter seeks to make the case that the British left, including the post-Brexit British left, should champion closer relations with, and ultimately membership in, a reformed social Europe.