Ed Miliband and Stefan Löfven This Friday the Commons will vote on the Conservative private members bill legislating for an in-out referendum on Britain’s EU membership before the end of 2017. It will almost certainly be defeated by Labour and Liberal Democrat opposition. All the same, some Labour figures want the party to offer the public a vote on Europe. This, combined with the austerity and deregulatory reforms championed by Angela Merkel and other centre-right EU leaders, might call the party’s traditional enthusiasm for the union into question. Is it going the way of the Conservative Party, a once-Europhile outfit now dominated by those who happily contemplate, or even advocate, leaving the union? In fact, Labour’s enthusiasm for the EU is alive and well. The party’s differences over a referendum are no sign of a eurosceptic lurch. Jim Murphy, the shadow defence secretary, for example, is one of the loudest advocates of a referendum and is as pro-European as they come. Instead, Labour is split over the merits of the vote itself: its internal debate concerns the relationship between diplomacy and the public square, not the EU.

Under Ed Miliband, however, its pro-Europeanism is evolving. Once it was a badge of the party’s reconciliation to the liberal market economy and emergence from the wide-eyed socialism of the early-1980s, when the sort of Labourites who wanted to leave the EU also demanded the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy. The last generation of party leaders was forged by that process.

Members of Mr Miliband’s generation, by contrast, gained their stripes when few in Labour were anything but pro-European. They were forged by the financial crash and the economic slump. They are partisans in a battle between varieties of capitalism, not one for or against it. Looking across the North Sea, they see social market economies with large current account surpluses and widespread prosperity. “Neue Labour”, some call it.

So Labour—itself increasingly fiscally hawkish—is at home in a Europe becoming more Teutonic: more fiscally conservative, more reliant on investment and exports, less reliant on consumption. The prospect of German-led structural reforms holds no terror for the party. In any case, Britain is by far the most economically liberal major economy in the EU already. Shadow cabinet members (including Jon Cruddas, a referendum enthusiast) have links to mainstream European politicians that would be unthinkable among their Conservative counterparts, who walked out of the centre-right European People’s Party in 2009. Mr Miliband is particularly close to Stefan Löfven, the leader of the Swedish social democrats, and Helle Thorning Schmidt, the Danish prime minister.

True repatriate-or-leave Eurosceptics—who dominate the Tory ranks and include several cabinet members—remain as rare in Labour as real Europhiles are in the Conservative Party: in each, the beleaguered minority constitutes some 10% of MPs, their views considered eccentric by colleagues. All this is relevant to any in-out membership debate. With the Tories split on Europe, it will fall to Labour to lead the “in” campaign. The party seems ready to oblige.