Well seeing as the Brexit supporting right wing have been quite enthusiastic about how they will abandon EU regulations on things like consumer protection laws or workers rights, I think we can safely say that the EU has the interests of people far more at it's heart than the British (or American) right.
The EU is also the only organisation that has both the clout and willingness to stand up for "people" over business. For example in passing the working hours directive or supporting higher standards of consumer protection than exist in the US for instance. So while it may be a liberal institution interested in enriching the rich at it's heart, it is still the best organisation in terms of being able to stand up for the average person against the excess of bug business and US style deregualtion that we have got.
I agree with the clout, but the actual willingness is another matter entirely. Let's be honest, the way politics has evolved a lot of our political class have a ten year lifespan in the bigger countries and a slightly longer one in smaller countries with political stability. When some of them get shifted to Brussels, they use the extensive industry networks here their to build their contact books more than anything else. I'm not sure its as cynical as what i hear from the US, because people here I meet from the Eurocrat zone seem to genuinely care about people, while not going into the pure theatricality the US Congress engages in to keep certain electorates on side (mainly because no European electorate cares about the EP other than us)
but once they are overwhelmed with the complexity of the legal systems they are dealing with, they tend to let "industry representatives" (the Eurospeak word for lobbyists) take them out for a nice lunch and present them with a false dilemma.
They're starting to clean up their act, the lunches are significantly cheaper, but a lot of MEPs can be swindled around here, and they're the ones who are supposed to protect the people. In the end corporations hire the very same people who legislated "against" them for "consultancy", the biggest example being José Manuel Baroso (who was a complete tosser too; but that's Commission is naive-liberal (look at how they dealt with the Ukraine Association Agreement), and the Council generally disolves into just states protecting their big industry interests.
I think the right-wing UK version of the EU was always the idea that mutual recognition of standards would triumph over a common regulatory framework. And if ever there was a conflict (say, a non-tarriff barrier) we could sort it out via a diplomatic roundtable; Council style...or Swiss style
. That, and the fact that the Eurozone and common foreign policy always meant some degree of political union, meant that the UK under the Conservatives was always going to distance itself, with or without the referendum they created. But they're not wrong in certain criticisms of the EU's regulatory methodology.
