SIR MICHAEL RAKES'S clarion call to businesses to "speak out early" in favour of remaining in a "reformed" European Union is entirely predictable.

His Confederation of British Industry (CBI) was an early advocate of Britain's membership of the common market, and for the same reason.

For the CBI, the EU offered and still offers an opportunity for British-based transnational corporations (TNCs) to operate profitably on a global scale. 

The CBI line chimes with the approach of the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), which favours greater and faster economic integration in Europe and similar streamlining of decision-making by the European Commission.

The ERT is on record demanding that the EU "act with a more unified voice on economic, financial, trade and education issues or face global irrelevance."

Greater unity requires not only the speedy completion of the single market within the EU itself but also the eradication of mechanisms that allow member states to slow down the process.

Former ERT secretary-general Keith Richardson pointed out in justification of the centralisation project that "The United States could do nothing if every decision had to be ratified by 52 states."

If the ERT were simply any old lobby group or think tank, such undemocratic plans could be discontinued. 

But its role as the face of dozens of TNCs in banking, telecoms, pharmaceuticals, steel, construction, food and drink, oil, electronics and other sectors gives it unsurpassed access to the commission that fashions all EU laws and directives.

Indeed, it is the source of much draft legislation, which is why the commission and the European Central Bank have imposed continent-wide austerity, claiming - wrongly - that this climate favours economic growth. 

The ERT is the driving force behind the TTIP free trade deal with Washington, which threatens the public sector, including our NHS, and will subject governments to arbitration in the interests of corporations.

The misnamed European Parliament that provides a comfortable living for MEPs and officials has few functions of a real parliament.

This talking shop with some overview duties is largely a sideshow to confect an image of the EU being somehow democratically accountable.

Such reality was at one time clear to Britain's trade unions and the left, which campaigned against ratification of EU membership in 1975.

Unfortunately, while the CBI remains true to its class interest, the unions and Labour Party were schmoozed by French diplomat "Frere Jacques" Delors into believing that the EU social charter could circumvent anti-working class measures imposed by Margaret Thatcher's Tory government.

Rather than admit they were conned, Labour and union advocates of EU membership make extravagant claims of social gains brought to workers. 

In fact, equal pay, the minimum wage, maternity and paternity leave, paid holidays and so on are the result of domestic legislation.

Union leaders back bosses' claims that leaving would cause mass unemployment because hundreds of thousands of jobs depend on exports to the EU.

But EU member states, especially Germany, have a trade surplus with Britain of £1 billion a week.

Why they would cut off their noses by freezing bilateral trade in response to Britain's exit from the EU defies logic. 

The labour movement should discard its EU comfort blanket and ask why it finds itself in the same trench as the most aggressive wing of monopoly capital in support of EU membership.

At the very least, it should start asking questions and answering them scrupulously rather than falling back on Frere Jacques's fairy stories.