LABOUR’S deal with the European Union is presented as a reset of constructive relations with our neighbours.

The Tories and Reform UK predictably condemn a sell-out designed to edge us back towards EU membership; the Liberal Democrats equally predictably suggest we should go further and faster.

The Scottish National Party, which has also called this week for our return to the EU, has had to be more nuanced in its response to an agreement on EU fishing fleet access to British waters that harms the interests of Scottish fishing communities.

The socialist left should not be diverted by these divisions among ruling-class parties.

There is real damage done by ceding fishing rights, both because of the over-exploitation of our waters and because of the impact on communities dependent on them.

News presenters breezily note that fishing accounts for just 0.4 per cent of GDP — a gloss that obscures the unbalanced nature of Britain’s economy and the importance of expanding productive industries to redress domination by the finance sector, as well as the long-term decline inflicted on many coastal towns by successive governments’ embrace of a globalised food industry that sees seafood harvested, packaged and sold on different continents.

This, as in ex-mining or industrial areas, drives support for the far right: it is no coincidence Nigel Farage opted to stand in the seaside Clacton constituency, nor that Reform UK has cynically adopted left-wing clothing on fishing issues, calling for a legal requirement to process fish caught in British waters on British territory.

Some will say a fixation on fish is unrepresentative. But the left should not ignore it: during the Brexit debate, a narrative that Leave-supporting communities were backward-looking often shaded into anti-working-class prejudice.

People know when they are being looked down on: one reason why Labour, whose vote surged in 2017, went down to catastrophic defeat in 2019 after effectively embracing the Remain cause.

Too much of the left has badly misjudged too much of the working class and paid the price. Rebuilding means recognising what went wrong — including the disdain for people caricatured as nostalgic for empire, when they were perhaps nostalgic for a more recent era of skilled jobs, affordable housing and near-full employment.

The European Union is depicted by liberals as a beacon of multiculturalism and tolerance counterposed to the white nationalist politics of a Trump or a Farage.

It is not. It is an imperialist bloc, which not only colludes with the United States in imposing the unequal treaties that keep so much of the world poor but has been instrumental to rolling back workers’ rights and public ownership across its member states, imposing savage austerity from Ireland to Greece.

Today, the EU’s main powers are attacking public services and social security to fund a new war drive — and access to an EU fund for military projects, which Starmer boasts of, is part of that.

The EU is no progressive alternative to a far right that in any case increasingly dominates it.

The real dividing line is between the old imperialist powers and a rising global South. China vies with the US for technological supremacy, the Brics group increasingly challenge the control of financial institutions and trade by Western powers, revolutionaries throwing off the yoke of imperialism in west Africa are joining hands with those fighting that battle in Latin America and the Far East.

These are the international forces the left should look to to reshape our world.

Trade deals will be struck with the EU and with other powers and blocs.

But we must not be distracted from the class enemy, again, by forces presenting the EU as a friend.

The answer to Britain’s malaise is not Washington or Brussels, but public ownership, an industrial strategy and the redistribution of wealth.