UNITE delegates’ decision yesterday to throw their weight behind an in-out referendum on EU membership is extremely welcome.

Now that Britain’s biggest union — and the Labour Party’s biggest donor — is in favour of giving the British people a say on a bloc whose laws affect us all, Ed Miliband has no excuse not to abandon his pig-headed refusal to hold such a vote.

Unite is not opposed to EU membership, although the recognition that the bloc has forced “great suffering on the people of Ireland, Greece, Spain, Portugal and elsewhere” shows it is aware of its neoliberal direction.

Many trade unionists and others on the left evidently continue to hope that its policies can be changed.

That is not this newspaper’s belief — the European Union is an anti-democratic bosses’ club. 

Its most powerful institutions, the European Commission and European Central Bank, are not elected and successive treaties have enshrined pro-market and anti-public ownership ideology into a network of law that cannot be altered without unanimous agreement among all 28 members.

Rulings of its European Court of Justice, most notably in the Viking and Laval cases, have defended the right of companies to undermine collective bargaining by bringing in cheaper foreign labour.

Its promotion of so-called competition has been used to push the privatisation of public services — including Britain’s railways — and it would certainly attempt to obstruct any future British government which tried to bring them back into public ownership.

On top of that it is currently negotiating the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the United States, a treaty that will allow corporations to sue governments which make decisions they feel might negatively affect their profit margins.

The savage cuts forced on various European governments as a condition of bank bailouts are not an aberration but reflect the nature of the EU project as a whole.

The recent victory of Jean-Claude Juncker’s bid to become president of the European Commission will only accelerate the neoliberal agenda. 

Mr Juncker led notorious tax haven Luxembourg — which only this spring acted to scupper a proposed clampdown on tax havens — for 18 years, was a key architect of the disastrous euro currency and was among the most hawkish advocates of counterproductive spending cuts in response to the bankers’ crisis that exploded in 2008.

In light of all this Len McCluskey’s remark that Unite’s executive is “solidly in favour of the EU” is rather puzzling, but the union has shown the courage Labour lacks in siding with democracy and calling for a referendum.

And as the Unite leader pointed out, a failure to offer a vote on the matter — which polls show is overwhelmingly the wish of the people in this country — is a gift to the Tories, allowing them to pose as the only party willing to give Britons a choice.

If Labour wants to win in 2015 — and a Conservative victory would be a nightmare for Britain’s working people — it urgently needs to change its mind.