Economic problems and the far right threaten the whole of Europe. Labour’s isolationist approach must change

‘There ought to be not only a national esprit de corps, but a European esprit de corps.”

This plea by the renowned barrister and lord chancellor FE Smith – who became the first Earl of Birkenhead – was made in the wake of the devastation caused by the first world war. Birkenhead, a friend of Churchill’s, died in 1930, shortly before the rise of Hitler and the subsequent outbreak of the second world war. Alas, no European esprit de corps in the 1930s!