With events in Europe of historical resonance unfolding before our eyes, it is more vital than ever to understand developments. But many on the left seem to be drawing precisely the wrong conclusions.

There is an argument gaining momentum on the left – given voice by Owen Jones in these pages last week – that the current EU crisis proves that the European project does not work for ordinary people. Many on the left, according to this line of argument, will have “dipped their toes” in the sea of Euroscepticism and found conditions more amenable than they expected. They invite the rest of us to join them: “Come on in,” is their pitch, “the water’s fine.”

There is so much wrong with this approach that it is difficult to know where to start. They link this argument to the treatment of Greece, a country that, until a few months before the last British referendum on Europe in 1975, was under military rule. All political parties had been dissolved; the Greek constitution’s protection of freedom of thought and press freedom had been suspended; military courts had been established. Trade unionists were imprisoned and tortured; the right of assembly was revoked; surveillance of citizens was an everyday fact of life; 8,000 people were held without trial.

What has happened in Greece in the period preceding this latest referendum is of deep concern, but it hasn’t led the Greek people to seek exit from the euro – let alone from the EU.

The most vociferous anti-EU voice in the Greek parliament is Golden Dawn, the far-right party created by Nikolaos Michaloliakos after prison brought him into contact with the incarcerated survivors of the Greek junta. Strange bedfellows indeed for our anti-EU left. The sceptics have no argument to explain how Britain’s departure from the EU would help Greece, beyond bizarrely endorsing the Boris Johnson school of negotiation (motto: “threaten to leave and the bastards will concede anything”).

It’s not hard to see why Greece so values EU membership. We in this country have never experienced military rule or the totalitarian regimes imposed by eastern European communism. But millions of British lives were lost in two world wars that began on our continent. The EU has made the biggest contribution to peace and democracy in Europe. The Greeks remember that and so should we.

There has always been a Eurosceptic left. Greece hasn’t changed its mind, it has merely provided it with an impetus and a fresh line of argument. Jones has always been a Eurosceptic and, in support of his “lonely crusade”, suggests the left was mistakenly beguiled into supporting the EU having been “battered and demoralised” by Thatcherism. But it’s simpler than that.

My experience in the trade union movement during its glam rock era is that we got it wrong. It was a time when we opposed the minimum wage and supported the closed shop; when we eschewed any basic minimum standards for working people underpinned in law because it might interfere with our ability to recruit members. Thus we opposed not just social Europe but the EU itself long after the referendum had settled the question of British membership.

What we saw under Thatcher was how quickly trade union influence and protection for working people could be removed by a determined Tory leader. The danger is that we might make the same mistakes all over again.

The old arguments against Europe still suffer from the old weaknesses. The EU is no more a grand corporatist conspiracy than it is the business-hating socialist project of the Tory right’s fevered imagination. Rather it is a political forum where the left must engage just as we do at national level. Whatever the travails of the eurozone, the key aspect of Britain’s engagement with the EU is the single market. Crucially, this is a market with rules, not least legislation to protect consumers, workers and the environment.

Just as David Cameron may seek to relax the rules protecting workers rights, so we must work to enhance them – for instance by tackling the exploitation of free movement of workers by insisting that they receive the wage rate appropriate to the sector (eg construction) rather than just the minimum wage.

In the months to come, the Labour party will connect with communities across the country. It will do this not to indulge in a fundamentally dishonest vision of leaving the EU for a promised land that doesn’t exist or simply to defend the status quo. We believe that, in an age of increasing interdependence, isolating Britain will damage growth, jobs and prosperity. The main victims of that adventurism would be ordinary UK workers.

Reform of the EU is not an event, it’s a process that requires us to build alliances and exert influence. We must expose the Eurosceptic fallacy that the EU is something that’s “done to us”; where Britain is somehow a perpetual victim of the other 27 member states.

The European Union is simply a place we have built where we can manage our interdependence. It was developed because the peoples of Europe recognised one value above all else – a value that we need today perhaps more than ever, not only to restore Greece to its rightful place in our European family but also to preserve Britain’s. Happily it is the most important value of the left: it’s called solidarity.