Yes, a vote for Labour this week will help stop Brexit, but it will also achieve much more than that

The MEPs we elect on Thursday will have a decisive say on Europe’s existential, continent-wide challenges

Can the Labour Party rally voters this Thursday? (Getty)

In the hundreds of hours spent in Parliament debating Brexit, I constantly think of how we could have spent our time better.

I imagine the legislation on housing, health, education and social improvement that could have been passed; the infrastructure that could have been built; the national humiliations we could have avoided. Maybe, in this alternate future, I would still be running as a Labour candidate in the forthcoming European elections for the beautiful South West region, but the argument would have been about a better Europe not just stopping Brexit.

I spend every day asking people to vote Labour to stop Farage and stop Brexit - via a second referendum with an option to remain.

Labour is the only party that can prevent the hard right winning these elections and stop them then claiming that victory as a mandate for a catastrophic no-deal Brexit. It is vital that mainstream voters seize this opportunity to stop the far right and I am proud to be making that case. Farage is England’s Salvini, Orban and Le Pen rolled into one.

However, instead of having to warn of the threats of Brexit, I would far rather be setting out the great manifesto of socialist MEPs Europe-wide, and explaining why we need more of them.

The Party of European Socialists (PES), which Labour MEPs are members of, would transform the EU in the interests of the many, not the few. We are pledged to creating EU unemployment insurance - to ensure that all EU citizens are cared for when recessions hit. We are arguing for higher minimum wages across the EU, to lift living standards. And we are committed to enshrining basic rights when it comes to pensions, healthcare, education, and social care.

Faced with the relentless incompetence and Thatcherism of this Tory Government, I would be advocating the PES plan for a pan-European industrial strategy to promote long-term investment in research and innovation in green infrastructure and regeneration.

We would be having a national conversation about how we can work through the EU, to fight abuses of power by multinational corporations like Facebook and how, together, we can make sure that those companies pay their fair share of tax too.

We would be promising to legislate to ensure that the EU becomes carbon neutral by 2050 and arguing for new safeguards to protect democracy and safeguard minorities from discrimination and abuse - not least within the EU itself.

We should also be debating European security and enlargement – particularly the flash-points of Ukraine and Serbia, where Putin is relentlessly destabilising democratic governments to keep them out of the EU and the west.

And we should be debating who is best to lead Europe after this Euro election. I strongly support the Dutch social democrat Frans Timmermans, who pioneered the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, as next president of the European Commission. But I would be content with the Danish liberal commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, who pioneered pan-European mobile phone roaming.

Both are better than the right’s favoured candidate of Manfred Weber, the Bavarian who got far too politically close to Orban’s quasi-fascists in the last European Parliament. This choice is vital to the future of Europe, but who in Britain has heard of any of them, still less knows what they stand for?

In Britain we are not having these debates. These European elections have become a proxy vote on Brexit instead. While we obsess over our Brexit psychodrama, the world moves on. Multinational companies exploit national differences to abuse their workers, to dodge their taxes and to “regulation shop” as a means to avoid meeting their responsibilities.

America and China are locked in a trade war that will do terrible damage to the global economy and in which smaller countries may be written off as collateral damage.

Global warming - utterly disinterested in our political paralysis - worsens at a terrifying pace. We can’t stop the world because we want to get off; we need a democratic socialist EU to fix these problems.

Luckily, all of this is still possible. The Party of European Socialists stands a good chance of selecting the next European Commission President and is Europe’s best hope if we are to fight the populist right. The big questions - on rights, on the economy and the environment - are being asked. A constructive agenda of European reform awaits if we engage in the European Parliament in favour of progressive policies and leaders.

The truth is, of course, that we have not Brexited and therefore we are voting this week. The MEPs we elect on Thursday will have a decisive say on Europe’s existential, continent-wide challenges. So my plea to voters this Thursday is this: yes, consider how best to stop the Brexit catastrophe, but also consider the future.

I want a European future where we extend and reinforce peace and prosperity to the east, a future where workers are better protected and inequalities reduced, where our energy and lifestyles are clean and green, where democracy is enhanced, where taxes are paid and corporations play by fair rules.

Vote Labour to stop Brexit. But also vote for us to secure a democratic socialist Europe!

Andrew Adonis, a former Labour Transport Secretary, is standing to be MEP for the South-West and Gibraltar.