Introduction

Abstract

The main intention of this work is to dispel the myth, assiduously cultivated over the past thirty years, that Britain’s Eurosceptics are backward-looking, nationalistic, even xenophobic ‘little Englanders’. All too often the Eurosceptical case has not been debated, still less refuted, but pilloried as an unworthy jingoistic prejudice, as unsubde and unconvincing as an editorial in The Sun newspaper. This parody of the Eurosceptical case has now become a grotesque caricature that gravely obscures the truth and impoverishes public debate. How convenient for the advocates of European federal integration that they need not take seriously the opposite case; it is easier to pour scorn and ridicule on Eurosceptic arguments than to rebut them.