Why is the EU supported by the left?

A post by Richard North about the EU's regulatory burden got me thinking about why is the EU currently supported by so many on the left? In the post Dr North outlines how it is that the cost of regulation falls disproportionatly hard on small firms and so are used by the largest corporation (the bete noir of many on the left) to crush their smaller rivals. This isn't the only way in which the EU helps the largest corporations (which lefties hate) at the expense of craftsmen/partnerships/co-operatives/small businesses (that the left tends to promote, at least since their prefered option of state control was shown unworkable). For example:

• Oxfam's claims about the problems that the EU's biofuel proposals could have on the third world.
• To gain the supposed benefits of the Euro in lowing transaction costs across national borders first you must be operating across national borders at a large scale. The larger the business the more likely this is so the more likely that they will gain, rather than the small ones.
• Likewise the costs from the deluge of regulation that originates in Brussels hurts small businesses far more than it does the large ones, where it is just absorbed into general the costs of being big.
• The left often claims to be in favour of localism, but what is localist about transfering power even further away from the people to a supra-national government?
• The left shows great consern for the impoverished world wide, such as in Africa, but the single largest thing we could do to help them would be to get rid of the EU's single largest spending item, the CAP.
• The left (like the libertarian right) is against corporate welfare, yet so many of the EU's policies are exactly that.
  
  1. There is the CAP where the cheaques are handed out in proportion to the amount of assests you hold.
  2. The EU emission trading scheme which is little more than a system of corporate welfare for the most poluting under the name of enviromentalism.
  3. Or the simple fact that as a customs union the EU is set up in order to give the corporations within it an unfair advantage over their competitors; for example can the tarrifs on energy saving lightbulbs from outside the EU combined with the ban on incandessant lightbulbs be seen as anything than a fairly blatant attempt to funnel money into the one corporation that will not have to pay the tarrifs?

It used to be that Uber-lefties, like the Third Viscount Stansgate, where firmly against the EU and its predecessors. Now you will find that most on the left are for the EU. What changed? Well not the EU, that is still plodding towards its goal of supra-national government under the guise of economic integration.