It might strike some in our more cynical political time as ironic to find that it is left to the current Labour leader, speaking at a CBI conference, to pick up on businesses’ concerns about the economic cost of our sleepwalking out of Europe. To say nothing of the damage done by the incessant Brexit threats issued by a relatively small band of ideological outers, and amplified by the mainstream media megaphones.

Time was when talk of European reforms meant a rational conversation about how to address the urgent structural and governance deficiencies of a continent still struggling to shake off the economic crisis. David Cameron could still muster such a level of rationality when he delivered his famous Bloomberg speech last year. One reading it will be struck by what a crisp, lucid and remarkably pro-EU piece of analysis it was by today’s standards.

He spoke of the need to complete the single market to include services and energy, simplifying regulation and cutting red tape, stepping up the creation of a digital market and improving the role played by national parliaments in negotiating and scrutinising EU legislation.

But no sooner were the reforms areas highlighted in the Bloomberg speech adopted by all European Leaders in their Strategic Agenda for the Union that the goal post was moved, ever more surreally UKIP-bounds towards the realm of glorious battles and epic struggles undiscovered.

To quote Ed Miliband speaking CBI delegates today ‘to use exit as a threat has simply weakened our influence not strengthened it. A country making ever-more incoherent demands, ever-more isolated from its partners, means we are on the conveyor belt towards exit with no idea how to get off.’

Miliband rightly highlighted that globalisation, and what has been for some a joyless recovery of stagnant wages and zero hour contracts, and not our membership of the EU, have put huge pressures on those at the bottom of the pile.

It might be natural for the losers in our economy, the Brits left at the mercy of gangmasters and a rapacious and poorly regulated rentier class, to turn against the immigrants next door but it is the job of leadership to fight the real causes of hardship and discontent. To spend weeks vilifying non-existent EU benefit scroungers or in indulgent arguments about the European Arrest Warrant, which 72 per cent of the public recognise is an essential crime fighting tool, is a considerable mistake.

You could say that Miliband has spotted a gap in the market: speaking sense to the public and business alike, about Europe, about stability and investments, about putting enough pounds in people’s pockets to allow them to spend some, against the noise of the – grotesquely amplified but ultimately minority – obsession with Brexit.

This might be what makes all the difference come May.

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Paola Buonadonna is media director at British Influence