DESPITE the calls of Jo Cox’s friend Rachel Reeves, a prominent Labour Remain campaigner, for the brutal and shocking murder of the 41-year-old Labour MP not to be linked to the referendum campaign, some EU supporters have done exactly that.

Cox’s tragic death has been used to bolster flagging support for Remain, particularly among Labour supporters whose votes are crucial if the Establishment side is to win.

The latest polls, which show a big swing to Remain after being 10 points down in one poll last week, seem to show that public grief over the murder has had an impact.

But while it seems certain that Cox’s murder was politically motivated (some, with justification, are asking why it has not been called a terrorist attack), the idea that the best way to make a stand against neonazi and far-right extremism is to cast a vote in favour of Britain remaining in the EU doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny.

For a start, far-right parties are more prominent and successful at the polls in other EU countries than they are in Britain.

The rise of such parties in Europe can be directly attributed to the adoption of deflationary economic policies, which the EU and its institutions have pushed on member states as part of its single currency project.

You don’t need to be Nostradamus to predict that when unemployment is very high — as it is across the EU — people are more likely to fall under the spell of ultra-nationalist demagogues who will put the blame on foreigners or immigrants for the economic woe, especially when there have been relatively high levels of migration caused by Western wars of aggression and destabilisation in the Middle East.

The far right has also been helped by the way that leading parties of the left have stopped standing up for the interests of working people and instead put their support for “European integration” before everything else.

The left, across the continent, has become detached from its working-class roots, and it’s the radical right that’s stepped into the void. That’s the reality of politics in neoliberal Europe in 2016.

The idea that the EU is a progressive bastion against racism is quite absurd. Anyone, for instance thinking of voting Remain to make a stand against anti-Muslim prejudice at home should reflect on the words of Robert Fico, Prime Minister of the country which takes over the rotating EU presidency in the summer: “It might look strange but sorry … Islam has no place in Slovakia,” he said in March.

“There has been no word of complaint from Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande — or, so far as I can discover, by any other European leader. David Cameron has said nothing,” notes commentator Peter Oborne.

Then there’s EU policies themselves to consider. In 2012, it was reported how “heavily subsidised EU-registered fleets, having over-fished in Europe, had turned their attention to West Africa.

“Europe has over-exploited its own waters, and now is exporting the problem to Africa. It is using EU taxpayers’ money to subsidise powerful vessels to expand into the fishing grounds of some of the world’s poorest countries and undermine the communities who rely on them for work and food,” a Greenpeace spokesperson told the Guardian.

EU foreign policies have hardly been “progressive” either. In the 1990s, the EU and its member states played a key role in the dismantling and destruction of socialist Yugoslavia, a country which had high levels of social ownership.

In Libya, alongside the US, they helped transform the country which had the highest standard of living in Africa into a terrorist hell-hole.

Racism played a big part in this “regime change” op too as anti-government death squads targeted black Africans. Let’s not forget too the way the EU championed an illegal “regime change” in Ukraine — in which neo­nazis and the far-right provided the violent “cutting edge” in anti-government protests.

The attempt to caricature British opponents of the EU as racist or borderline racist “Little Englanders” ignores the fact that the some of the strongest voices of opposition to the EU have come from the genuinely internationalist socialist left, which of course includes this newspaper.

The likes of Dave Nellist, Lindsey German, George Galloway and Dennis Skinner, all of whom support Lexit, have spent their political careers opposing all forms of racism. 

Their opposition to the EU and the opposition of socialists like Tony Benn and Bob Crow before them is based on the fact that this undemocratic, multinational corporation/finance capital-friendly organisation works against the interests of working people — whatever their colour, religion or nationality — across the continent. You only need to go to Greece to see the truth of that.

If right-wing voices, focusing heavily on immigration, have made the running in the referendum debate, then that’s largely to do with the fact that the Labour Party has, since the mid 1980s, taken a wrong turn on the EEC/EU.

Although Britons voted to stay in the then Common Market in 1975, Euroscepticism in the Labour Party remained strong.

In the much maligned manifesto of June 1983, one of the most left-wing in its history, Labour advocated withdrawal from the EEC.

But the party unfortunately took the wrong lessons from its 1983 defeat and under the leadership of Neil Kinnock did a complete U-turn on Europe.

While its new line on the EEC/EU earned the party favour with the liberal commentators, it has undoubtedly cost Labour dear with working-class voters in England in recent years.

The votes the party lost to Ukip in key seats in England 2015 greatly damaged its chances of returning to power.

The left’s moving away from socialist positions to more Establishment-friendly liberal ones, not just on the issue of the EU but on the economy generally, has played into the hands of populist parties of the right.

What is urgently needed now is what the French philosopher Jean-Claude Michea called for in his book The Adam Smith Impasse, and other works, namely for socialism to decouple from liberalism and rely instead on the common decency and altruism of ordinary people.

As Michea says, liberal bourgeois ideals have triumphed over socialism. Genuine socialist collectivism will be hard enough to achieve in Britain even outside of the EU, but as Galloway has stated, it would be constitutionally impossible within.

In my Public Ownership column last month, I showed that even Labour’s modest renationalisation plans would be likely to fall foul of EU rules and face legal challenges.

If we really want to call a halt to almost 40 years of privatisation and embark on a major programme of renationalisation then we have to exit the EU.

The British Establishment clearly feels rattled by what the Guardian’s John Harris has called “a working-class revolt,” and will, in the weeks and months ahead, try to clamp down on popular dissent.

But we should not allow the elite to exploit a tragic death in order to restore “business as usual” and to use it as an excuse to put the “little people” back in their place.

Voting to leave the imperialist, big-business-friendly EU was the progressive call before the awful murder of Jo Cox. It is still the progressive call today.

• A longer version of this article appears at www.rt.com. Neil Clark is the co-founder of the Campaign for Public Ownership @PublicOwnership. Follow him on Twitter @NeilClark66.