AS I write this, the UK Government is facing the prospect of defeat on its Queen’s Speech, the equivalent of a Programme for Government debate at Holyrood.

This would be the first time such a thing has happened since the 1920s, and like so much else in the current state of UK politics it comes down to a proxy for the EU referendum debate. What has been described as civil war within the Tory Party is getting ever closer to boiling over.

The defeat, if it comes, will be the result of Tory, Labour, SNP and Green MPs voting together to demand that the NHS is given specific protection from TTIP, the EU/US trade deal, which The National has covered on many occasions but which most media outlets have barely mentioned. An NHS exemption has long been the position of the SNP and many in Labour, while the Greens would prefer to see the whole deal killed off. But Tory MPs fulminating against a free trade deal must be a pretty rare sight – and of course in reality they have no genuine interest in restricting the excesses of free-market capitalism.

Those in the Brexit wing of the Tories, and indeed those in the Ukip ranks, don’t object to TTIP as a threat in principle. All they want is for the UK to negotiate multiple, bilateral trade deals to do much the same thing with other countries around the world, instead of via the EU’s single market. Our privatised public services would remain in shareholders’ hands, increasingly difficult for any progressive government to bring back into the public sector. Disputes between big business and government would still be resolved in the interests of investors not the common good. And the relentless downward pressure on regulation would continue, eroding the protections in areas like workplace rights, environmental pollution and equality, which have been hard won over many years.

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t take the opportunity of supporting a demand for NHS exemption from TTIP of course. We just shouldn’t be satisfied with it.

That issue should be the beginning of a wider debate about how we should limit market forces in the general interest, and how a degree of democratic control can be returned to economic power that has been systematically handed over to the unaccountable market.

This is what has been missing from the EU debate. Just as the Scottish independence referendum was about more than one Yes/No question, and engaged huge numbers of people in the broader debate about what kind of country we want Scotland to be, so the EU referendum should be an opportunity to ask what kind of Europe we want. David Cameron and Boris Johnson may disagree about the binary choice, but they agree about their goal of a narrow, selfish, devil-take-the-hindmost, free-market economy. I’ll be voting to remain in the EU, but not for anything close to the same reasons as David Cameron.

It’s important over the final weeks of the campaign that we assertively make the case for a socially just, environmentally responsible, peaceful and democratic Europe. The EU has been at its best when it has pursued those ideals, and it has only moved away from them as a result of right-wing member state governments. Indeed, it’s been the UK Government that has proactively sought to oppose bold action on issues like a financial transaction tax, a ban on the use of dangerous chemicals like neonicotinoids, and limits to bankers’ bonuses. Even now it’s the UK Government that is still dragging its feet on the issue of legal tax avoidance, while the EU is trying to take action. I can understand why some right-wing ideologues want powers brought back from Europe to the UK Government, but I can’t understand why anyone who rejects that ideological stance would want to do the same.

Winning the vote to stay in the EU wouldn’t guarantee a socially and environmentally enlightened Europe. We need to do so much more than that; those of us who saw independence not as an end in itself but rather as a catalyst for social and economic change in Scotland knew that the referendum was only the beginning.

Similarly, we now need to work with others across Europe who want to make a stronger case for progressive, environmental and left-of-centre politics at member-state level, learning from one another’s successes and setbacks, supporting one another and pulling Europe’s politics in a better direction.

As austerity bites hard, and as the world finally begins to wake up to the urgency of the climate crisis, we cannot afford to wait.

In our domestic politics, the current Tory chaos is an opportunity also to shatter the thin ice upon which their political success sits.