Ed Miliband's attempt yesterday to kick any referendum on EU membership into the long grass is a betrayal of Britain's working people.

He claims that the public will be given a choice on membership of the anti-democratic free market bloc only if there is a further "transfer of powers" - which he deems "unlikely."

Such optimism is misplaced. Ever since the European Economic Community was founded by the Treaty of Rome in 1957 it has been a tool for the capitalist class to remove powers from people's elected representatives in national parliaments.

The Single European Act of 1986, the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 and the Lisbon Treaty of 2007 all imposed further restrictions on the right of sovereign governments to manage their economies.

Strict limits on government debt undermined the post-war consensus that the state should intervene to boost demand during recessions, instead dictating that the market "solve" such crises by allowing rising unemployment to depress wages.

The bankruptcy of this strategy was proved during the Great Depression of the 1930s - and has been equally obvious since 2008 as EU-mandated assaults on public spending have led the economies of Greece, Portugal and Spain to the brink of collapse, seen unemployment soar to crisis levels and legitimised a class war against working people, who have seen their job security, wages and pensions snatched away.

The EU decree that public ownership of utilities including rail, postal services, energy and banks is an affront to "competition" entrenches neoliberal privatisation dogma in law, meaning an EU member state would be unable to renationalise strategic assets even if a government is elected on a pledge to do so.

And the EU has consistently shown its contempt for democracy.

Its treaties have been cobbled together by power-brokers behind the scenes. Its Central Bank is not accountable to its toothless parliament - neither is the European Commission, which drives the project.

When its treaties are put to the popular vote - which is not often - they are rejected. But no matter. The Eurocrat response to such setbacks was well summed up by former French president Nicolas Sarkozy after the Irish people rejected the Lisbon Treaty - "Ireland will have to vote again."

The Lisbon Treaty itself was a rehashed version of a proposed European constitution, which had to be adopted in disguise since the people of France said No to it in 2005 and France was too big to be ordered to hold another vote.

So Europe has form on gobbling up more powers. But even if it does not do so, Mr Miliband is depriving us of the chance to say No to the appalling restrictions on public ownership and economic self-determination already in place - many of which have been introduced since we last had a say on the matter 39 years ago.

His cowardly address to big business forum the CBI - which, naturally, welcomed it - confirms a dangerous trend in British politics to leave opposition to the EU to xenophobes such as Nigel Farage, allowing people's real concerns about the bloc to be exploited by the far-right.

This is what makes a strong vote for the No2EU initiative backed by the RMT union and the Communist Party among others so important this May.

Fighting the EU is not anti-European. It is not some conspiracy hatched on the continent against Britain. It is a conspiracy of Europe's capitalists, including those in Britain, against all European working people.

The labour movement must wake up to this as a matter of urgency, following the lead of RMT and its leader Bob Crow, whose tragic death this week deprived trade unionism of its staunchest voice for democracy and against the bosses' club that is the EU.