For the last few years criticism of the EU, and outright hostility to European economic and political integration, have often appeared to be the exclusive province of the far right, though this is far from being the case outside Britain.

Whether it’s the BNP, Ukip or elements within the Tory Party, the far right can always be relied upon to come up with an “anti-European” soundbite.

It’s clear enough why these people are hostile to “Europe.” They hate foreigners.

Yet it’s the left, socialists and trade unionists who have most reason to oppose this European Union.

That’s why progressive organisations such as the Socialist Party of the Netherlands, the Swedish Left Party, the newly established Spanish Podemos and Syriza (recently humiliated for its insolence in mounting a challenge to the orthodoxy) have developed searing critiques of the way things are done in Brussels, criticisms which are widely shared within their respective countries’ trade unions.

In keeping with our internationalist traditions, the British labour movement must do more to co-operate with these forces in launching a challenge to the EU’s “austerity” policies and the philosophy behind them, as well as to its erosion of democracy.

Attacking European economic and political integration from an internationalist perspective may seem a contradiction. In reality, it is anything but.

The EU certainly makes co-operation easier between multinational corporations, employers’ groups and the increasingly homogeneous political elite.

When it comes to workers’ organisations, however, the story is very different.

Under the rules of the single European market, trade unions may be guaranteed legality, but the kind of activities — up to and including strike action — which make them effective are only permissible if the European Court of Justice (ECJ) so rules.

Doesn’t the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights give everyone the right to join a union and every union the right to take strike action?

It does indeed, but it also effectively leaves it up to the EU’s own supreme legal body, the ECJ, to define the circumstances under which this right may be exercised.

What about the Council of Europe’s European Social Charter?

This may appear to go no further, but there is one crucial difference — it gives the last word to a non-EU body, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), whose record on labour law is massively better than that of the blatantly pro-employer ECJ.

Unfortunately, although every member state has ratified the Charter, the EU as a legally constituted body has not, despite being obliged to do so by its own Treaty of Lisbon, which has been in force since 2009.

And it is the ECJ which, by raising all kinds of legal quibbles, has prevented this.

This is the same ECJ which, in a series of decisions known as “the Laval Quartet,” severely narrowed the definition of “legitimate” strike action.

At the same time as repeatedly trumpeting the right to strike, it has allowed this to be overridden by employers’ rights conferred by “freedom of establishment,” which gives EU nationals the right to set up a business anywhere within the 28 member states.

A ruling in the case of a Finnish union last February appears to restore the right to equal pay for equal work for employees from outside the member state where the work is carried out, which those earlier rulings cast into doubt. This is more than welcome.

Clearly, while the ECJ retains the “last word” on labour rights, it’s important to keep up the kind of pressure which led to this change of interpretation.

However, as long as it retains this interpretative power, rights — and not just labour rights — will remain vulnerable to manipulation.

Accession to the ECHR would mean that EU law and jurisprudence could be monitored by an external body guided by the European Social Charter, which, in the words of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) constitutes “an impressive framework for the protection of trade union and workers’ rights.”

Whether it’s “impressive” or not is a matter of opinion, but it’s demonstrably more effective than the EU’s own Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Though Article 12 of that document does state that “everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association at all levels, in particular in political, trade union and civic matters, which implies the right of everyone to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his or her interests,” it again leaves it up to the ECJ to define what the trade unions to which it refers may or may not do.

The same applies to Article 28 on the “Right of collective bargaining and action,” which guarantees workers “the right to negotiate and conclude collective agreements at the appropriate levels and, in cases of conflicts of interest, to take collective action to defend their interests, including strike action.”

In a capitalist system the right to strike is all that stands between the “free worker” and slavery.

Its downgrading is part of a broader pattern in which, over the last four decades, the “rights” of capital have been redefined as human rights, while those of labour have been seen increasingly as sectional interests.

This is not the only criticism of this EU which should concern us as trade unionists and citizens of a supposedly democratic country.

Repeatedly, and most recently and spectacularly in the case of Greece, the EU’s unelected institutions have overruled or ignored the decisions of national electorates or the bodies which they elect.

European Commissioners, EU officials and Euro-MPs pay themselves huge salaries and give themselves incredibly generous pension rights, while attacking everyone else’s.

They have foisted onto much of the continent a single currency which gives the European Central Bank (ECB) effectively dictatorial powers over eurozone member states.

Although Britain mercifully shunned the euro, many of the measures associated with it apply here as well.

And now they may be about to take us into a trade treaty, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) which will leave British workers and consumers at the mercy of reactionary and ineffective US law.

We must not leave critical analysis of the EU to right-wing Tories, Ukip and worse.

Whether you think that European economic integration is a good or bad thing, it cannot be good that it is being done at the expense of working people.

• Steve McGiffen is editor of Spectrezine.