Deborah Orr: Who will speak up for Europe? Even Labour seems to find it a tiresome obligation

The weary agreement among EU heads of state, a couple of the nations in question already having had their fingers burnt, is that the calm advance of the Union is not something, after all, that can be exposed to the vagaries of referendums, because the general population is just too dumb to understand that a "Yes" vote is the only option.

Therefore, the Reform Treaty exists in order that all the things pro-Europeans say they want – debate, engagement, involvement, consensus – can be avoided as much as possible. And I'm afraid there comes a point where it is incumbent upon pro-Europeans, more than anyone else, to stand up and say: "Actually, this sucks."

What is Gordon Brown actually talking about when he boasts of defending our red lines and promises that, as long as we keep him in power, there will be no constitutional changes in favour of Europe? What is David Cameron actually talking about when he demands a referendum, and a full public debate about our place in Europe?

A person unused to the shallow immaturity of British parliamentary politics might conclude that Brown is the man who leads the party that is sceptical about Europe, while Cameron is the right-wing darling of poor, routed one-nation Toryism. The general standard of political debate around Europe has become so completely exhausted and so cynically counter-intuitive that it is almost a sad joke.

Few politicians appear to have much that is cogent to say on Europe, either positively or negatively. During these past days of supposedly heightened discussion, Labour MPs have countered Conservative taunts over the reneged-on promise of a referendum with: "It was Heath who took us in!" and "It was Wilson who gave a referendum!"

The Conservatives have been fatally divided over Europe for decades now, yet such petty responses from Labour only illustrate just how impossible Labour has found the task of finding an inspiring narrative that silences the bickering.

No one enthuses about Europe any longer. It has become a bothersome obligation that bores everyone absolutely rigid. It is hard even to work out whether we lost interest in Europe because it is so boring or whether it is deliberately made boring so we would all lose interest. The architects of the European project are intolerably shifty, and in the face of what? Sure, there is a vociferous movement against Europe in Britain. But it is hardly an alliance of intellectual giants, comprising as it does a mass of old duffers who have failed to understand that one-nation Conservativism was felled not by socialism but by neo-liberalism, and that the latter rather than the former is the ideology that mainly drives the Union.

Sure, that movement strikes a chord with the population, which distrusts Europe, with its bossy insistence on selling us the sort of shiny unscarred fruit we all choose anyway, prodding us into surrendering our sovereignty by strapping our children into proper car seats, looking disappointed in us because we can't stop thinking in miles, and being hot on assisting us in the defence of our democratic rights.

But, the population has every reason to feel resentful of Europe because, as this latest spectacle so amply illustrates, it's simply not interested in what ordinary people's views might be anyway, and therefore reaps as it sows. Hardly anyone even knows who their MEP is – I haven't the foggiest – and why should anyone, because MEPs don't have much power to intervene in our lives. Without our grumbles about Europe, we have no way of acknowledging its existence at all.

If some MEP was off in Lisbon last week defending our red lines, then we might show an interest in who that MEP was, what that MEP stood for and how that MEP got there. But that would suggest that Europe really had destroyed our national sovereignty, and that we really were being governed from Brussels and Strasbourg. The fact that the European Parliament touches us so little is testament to its irrelevance to our daily lives. That's why the electoral turnout is always so low. It truly doesn't matter so terribly much, and everyone knows it.

Which is, of course, a problem in itself. The European Parliament may not make many decisions, but it does ratify the decisions of others. Europe remains a shadowy entity to most people precisely because the most influential apparatchiks are appointed rather than elected, and so have no incentive to let us know how busy they are on our behalf, and how well they are representing our interests.

Many of the people who stand most firmly against Europe do so for the same reason as many of the people who believe themselves most ardently in favour of it. It is considered by such types to be some sort of anti-nationalistic socialist superstate in the making, inexorably expanding as a sinisterly hostile bulwark against US hegemony, standing for the social-democratic values of Europe.

Instead though, it's really not much more any longer than an interesting practical experiment in the relationship between free and fair trade, advancing on the principle that the unfettered movement of goods, people and capital is what will eventually bring peace, prosperity and equality to the world.

The European ideal is all about spreading free-market democracy and not so different to the US ideal, which is why there is no clear blue water at all between the US's ideas about what should be done about, say, Turkey, and Europe's. Each entity wants Turkey to become part of Europe, for geopolitical reasons.

Eurosceptics have no political counter-argument to this, just a rabbit-in-the-headlights fear that Young Turks will soon be swarming all over Britain just as annoyingly industrious as young Poles and Lithuanians are now.

This vast influx of the latter is only doing what economists have long noted tends to happen as free-market democracy spreads. The disparity in wealth between nations diminishes while the disparity in wealth within nations increases. Europe is achieving what the right says it wants.

One can see it in action, as Poles come here and drive wages down, and Brits go to Poland seeking cheap and eager workforces abroad and increasing its growth rate. Brown is particularly keen, it should be noted, to combat the "immigration problem" by introducing a more plastic notion of national identity, rather more like America's, that emphasises common values rather than a shared gene pool.

In fact, the more one thinks about it, the more aware one becomes of the uncomfortable fact that, if anyone should be vociferously hostile to Europe, then it ought to be the old left, rather than the old right. No wonder Labour likes to keep quiet about Europe, leaving the Tories to suggest that it's a socialist experiment in anti-Americanism when nothing could be further from the truth. It's the only way Brown can keep his core vote onside.

d.orr@independent.co.uk