By Denis MacShane

The Clacton by-election campaign is over. It had the advantage of allowing Labour to freeze any discussion about what a new Labour Prime Minister might say or do on the eternal question of Europe.

To be fair, Labour PMs have not found it easy to discuss Europe. Clement Attlee refused to join the initial European Community of Steel and Coal industries set up in 1951.

Proud of seeing off continental nationalist politics after 1940 Labour and the industrial trade unions thought Britain’s steel, coal, and manufacturing industries were world-beaters and certainly didn’t need to cooperate with any defeated Europeans.

Denis Healey, then Labour’s international secretary, said the European Iron and Coal community, forerunner of the European Economic Community, was “capitalist, catholic and a cartel” and so sturdy British protestants should have nothing to do with European integration.

Harold Wilson, an Oxford PPE graduate, knew that isolating Britain from European economic development was dumb. But he could not overcome the Europhobe socialism-in-one-country left in Labour and the unions then headed by Tony Benn, Jack Jones, Arthur Scargill, Barbara Castle, Neil Kinnock and rising young stars like Robin Cook and Jack Straw. Wilson moaned that he “was wading in shit every morning on Europe to keep Labour together.”

He did however come up with the wheeze of a referendum which in 1976 voted to confirm membership of the EEC, a decision taken by the Tory government and the Commons in 1970. Of course when David Cameron thought a referendum was the answer to Tory Europhobia as it grew under the Tony Blair governments the result was Brexit which has seriously hurt the UK economy, opened the door to 4 million immigrants from Asia and Africa to replace the Catholic Poles and other workers from Europe who worked and lived amongst us just as Brits went to study, live, work and retire in Europe before the Tories shut down that freedom.

Jim Callaghan in retirement said he “preferred the Empire to Europe.” In 2022 Sir Keir Starmer addressed the Labour Movement for Europe annual meeting and said his policy was “To Make Brexit Work”. That oxymoron was exactly the same policy enunciated by Theresa May when she became PM. Brexit can no more be made to work than Tory appeasement policy in the late 1930s could be made to work.

Today the CBI leader Rain Newton Smith agrees that Brexit has damaged business but then says the  CBI and business leaders don’t want to “relitigate the referendum.” This is the declared policy of Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage who endlessly say the 2016 Brexit plebiscite vote of 37 per cent of all registered voters to break trade and personal links with Europe must last for eternity.

Labour ministers appointed by Andy Burnham also appear to be agreeing that the Starmer-McSweeney 2024 election red lines of no return to normal trade with Europe and the policy of denying British citizens the right to work, live or retire in Europe – the Boris Johnson Europhobe ideology  – cannot be re-examined.

Normally when a new prime minister takes over he or she is permitted to reexamine the failed policy of his predecessors and the CBI and business are usually the first to encourage a new PM to look afresh at failed policy.

There are plenty of examples of European nations which trade normally with each other without using the single currency as well as controlling who enters or lives in their countries.

Andy Burnham who speaks a European language and whose family is part European should just relax and leave the endless repetition of now decades-old Brexit mantras to Farage and Badenoch and instead speak for the two-thirds of the British people according to all polls who want a fresh start with our neighbours across the Channel.

It is not a question of rejoining the EU as the Europe of 2016 like the Britain of 2016 no longer exists. The Putin invasion of Ukraine highlights the need for European defence that cannot be left to an increasingly erratic isolationist Washington.

The collapse in UK growth just announced is inevitable if we stop normal trade with the world’s biggest market whose rules British ministers helped set and police up to 2016.

But Labour and other MPs from parties not led by the Kemi-Nigel double act can start taking their own initiatives to talk to business and make links with MPs in the 27 EU parliaments and governments to see if all British businesses want to be isolated from the European markets as the CBI’s Rain Newton Smith appears to accept.

Rights for workers on the continent under the cross party acceptance that the Catholic Church’s social teaching has a role to play in bringing some fairness to the workplace can help grow and make fairer working Britain.

Europe needs more defence firms based on the collaborative Airbus model. Europe’s Airbus is now the world’s best-selling airliner.

Monolingual Whitehall can learn from better practice in managing the water industry or sending far fewer people to prison. Again this is not about bowing before a Brussels Eurocracy but creating a learning Labour Britain that closes the chapter of anti-European ideology that took over the Tories this century.

• Denis MacShane is a senior former UK government minister who was Minister of Europe under Tony Blair. His latest book is “Brexiternity. The Uncertain Fate of Britain.”