EVEN by the smug standards of Holyrood the excoriation of Labour’s Neil Findlay this week for abstaining on the European referendum vote was political posturing on the grand scale. The result, of course, was a resounding one across all parties for remaining in Europe, but it was like watching two junior five-a-side teams providing half-time entertainment at a national cup final. The debate’s main interest value lay in observing through the cracks of our fingers which of the new batch of MSPs could speak fluently and stand at the same time.

How much more potent this debate would have been if Scotland, as an independent state, had decided to ask its own people if they wanted to join the European Union. As it is, we voted to let the Westminster Tories continue to organise our affairs and now, as a consequence, we are being asked to take sides in a vote which only the reactionary wing of that party wants. Their principle opponents are the slightly less reactionary wing of the English Conservative party.

In David Cameron the European Union has never had a more reluctant champion. He only included the In/Out referendum in his manifesto in the expectation that he could use it as a bargaining chip in coalition government with the Lib-Dems. The Tories’ unexpected majority at Westminster means Cameron is running around the country doing an Onion Johnny act that fools no one while the scarecrow wing of his party throws rotten fruit at him.

With four weeks to go until the referendum Neil Findlay’s decision to abstain on Holyrood’s empty vote represented the position of many Scots at this juncture. I have a lot of sympathy for this as I, too, am far from certain on which way to vote come June 23. His honesty scarce deserved the supercilious scorn, expressed in a tweet, of the SNP’s Humza Yousaf. “Seriously, four weeks out from a referendum, as someone steeped in the arguments, you haven't made up your mind?”

Well, Humza, I haven’t made up my mind either and I suspect many other Scots are in the same position. And since when were SNP politicians allowed to make up their own minds on anything? Have I missed something recently?

The natural instincts of many on the British left, I suspect, are to vote to remain in Europe. As the Conservative Party has regressed further towards the right so has their animosity towards workers’ employment rights, trade union representation and anti-discrimination against women in the workplace. These rights were hard-won over more than a century and, at every turn, were opposed by the Conservatives and their natural allies in big business. Even now the Conservative administration at Westminster has sought to diminish the influence of trade unions by making it more difficult for them to fund the Labour Party and to take strike action. There are, of course, no such limits on funding for the Tories by tax-avoiding corporations.

Maternity leave, paternity leave, annual paid holiday leave and whatever rights to security of employment that still exist are all protected by EU law. No-one is suggesting that the UK is full of entrepreneurs who, morally, would always feel obliged to provide fair pay and decent conditions for their workers. The speed with which firms choose to dispense with employees while preserving the culture of massive bonuses and executive pay-offs shows us that we still need all the help that EU law provides. If I choose to vote for the UK to remain within the European Union it will be for that protection.

There are, though, several good reasons for a socialist and a Scottish nationalist to vote to leave Europe. Influential voices within the European Union were quick to make public their distaste for the possibility of Scotland gaining independence. These were repeated so often that some us began to wonder if the EU had officially registered to be a campaigner on the Better Together side. Jim Sillars has been eloquent in attempting to persuade his fellow nationalists that it would be easier for Scotland to leave the UK if it was outside the EU. According to Sillars an independent Scotland would be able to forge favourable treaties with Brussels but a Scotland trying to leave the UK would be 'told to get stuffed'.

The behaviour of the EU under manipulation of Angela Merkel during the Greek debt crisis in 2014/15 was an exercise in aggressive, free market intimidation of a small country struggling to repay the onerous debts that German companies, among others, had rushed to give them throughout the last 10 years. The propaganda at this time was that Europe’s responsible citizens, Germany, France and Britain, were imposing a measure of tough love on our delinquent but still fondly regarded young Greek tearaways. Only by obeying our stringent austerity measures could we nurse the Greek patient back to health. It was a carefully constructed lie to cover an exercise in rampant, unregulated capitalism.

The Nobel prizewinning economist Paul Krugman, writing last year in the New York Times, destroyed the myth. “I fairly often encounter assertions to the effect that Greece didn’t carry through on its promises, that it failed to deliver the promised spending cuts. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, Greece imposed savage cuts in public services, wages of government workers and social benefits. Thanks to repeated further waves of austerity, public spending was cut much more than the original program envisaged, and it’s currently about 20 percent lower than it was in 2010.”

Elsewhere in the New York Times Krugman noted: “European discourse is still dominated by ideas the continent’s elite would like to be true, but aren’t. And Europe is paying a terrible price for this monstrous self-indulgence.”

In effect the EU’s capitalist troika – the IMF, European Central Bank and European Commission – was making ordinary Greeks (and Spaniards) pay not only for the profligacy of their own business elites but also for the irresponsible lending of German banks looking for an easy return for their investors. For every bad decision by Greek capitalists there was another by German capitalists. So let’s not get carried away with any ideas that in Europe, as in the UK, we’re all in it together.

In the final analysis, though, the images and words of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Iain Duncan-Smith and Nigel Farage touring the country and spreading fear about immigration and a European Third Reich have been the most stomach-churning of the entire In/Out campaign. In doing so they have given us a glimpse of how little the difference there is between the right wing of the Conservative party and the toxic politics of UKIP. And with it we have also been given a sneak preview of what this country might be like run by Boris Johnson’s updated brand of Thatcherism where there is no appeal to European social democracy.