Richard A. E. North

He began collaborating with the journalist Christopher Booker in the early 1990s, co-publishing on a range of issues, including the European Union. Their works advance a popular though academically disputed historiography of the UK's membership of the European Union. Their first book, The Mad Officials: How The Bureaucrats Are Strangling Britain (1994), focused on EU regulation in the UK, and was followed by The Castle of Lies: Why Britain Must get Out of Europe (1996) and The Great Deception: Can the European Union Survive? (2005). In 2004, he published a Bruges Group paper on the European Union's Galileo satellite navigation system.[11]

North's blog, eureferendum.com, reached third place on the Technorati list of most influential blogs in the UK for 2006.[12]

In a post on his eureferendum.com blog, in May 2015, North called on supporters of the UK withdrawing from the EU to contact him with the aim of forming a volunteer unit to "monitor, add, and edit" Wikipedia content to be more favourable to their views.[13] Furthermore, he claimed that Wikipedia's "wrong" coverage of climate change, of which North is a notable denier, proved the need for such endeavors.[13]

Since the Brexit referendum of 2016, the EU Referendum blog has grown increasingly critical of perceived shortcomings of the UK Government in the negotiating process, including its failures to acknowledge the difficult trade-offs necessary in the negotiations and the refusal of the UK authorities to engage with Flexcit, or a path like EEA/EFTA membership, in exchange for a "No Deal" exit.

North is the original author and main proponent of Flexcit (standing for "Flexible Continuous Exit"), a policy suggestion involving gradual British disengagement from the European Union.[14] It has been claimed by Andrew Orlowski of The Register that Flexcit became a point of reference for civil servants.[15]

Flexcit argues that exit from the EU is "a process rather than an event", so advocating a phased repatriation of powers,[16] which has been described as "Brexit lite".[17] The document proposes that Britain should retain membership of the European Economic Area by rejoining the European Free Trade Association, often called the Norway option.[18] Under the proposal, Britain would initially adopt the community acquis of the European Union, the accumulated legislation, legal acts, and court decisions which constitute the body of European Union law. North argues that under this approach to EU exit there would be very little visible consequence of Britain's change in status, either for the better or the worse. Further renegotiation of trade and governance would become a longer-term option.[19]

North was one of seventeen shortlisted entrants invited to submit a full submission to the Institute of Economic Affairs's 2013 Brexit Prize competition. Entrants were asked to imagine an "out" vote in a proposed referendum on United Kingdom membership of the European Union and asked to compose a blueprint for the process of withdrawal, taking account of Britain's relationship to global governance and trade systems.[20] His proposal reached the shortlist for the final. It became the official policy of Arron Banks' Leave.EU campaign that vied unsuccessfully for official recognition as the official Leave campaign.[21]

The EU politics writer and blogger J. Clive Matthews has argued that North is guilty of "pandering to his audience’s preconceptions and prejudices".[22] A European Commission official and academic has argued that North and Booker are best seen as "latter-day pamphleteers", who "exaggerate their case", advancing an "all-embracing, Kafkaesque conspiracy, the "System", consisting of an evil partnership between Brussels and Whitehall".[23] A review of North's co-authored book The Great Deception: Can the European Union Survive? (2005), in the academic journal The Historian described his "skewed portrayal" of European integration "against the will of a bamboozled European public", as "not so much false as ludicrous", noting "the book loses whatever credibility it accrues in its better chapters by its persistently exaggerated language".[24] Another review, in the Prague-based academic journal Perspectives, praises the book's attempted scope, but accuses the authors of straying into "populism", and "lack[ing] objectivity", noting the book "should be read as an expression of one view of European integration rather than a well balanced academic source".[25] The reviewer concludes by noting the importance of the book's influence on popular euroscepticsm in the UK, but warns readers to look elsewhere for "an objective information source".[25]

Princeton University's Andrew Moravcsik, whose research is cited in the book, has accused the authors of "misconstruing" his work as supporting their narrative and failing to demonstrate that there were any viable alternatives to European Union membership, with Booker and North's economics being "even dodgier than their history".[26] He further argues that their "Eurosceptic dogma" of an "undemocratic" scheme of centralised regulation" is undermined by their own examples; that it is largely "British officials exercising their own discretion" and juggling the fate of special interest groups against the wider economy.[26]

Responding to a question on "Flexcit" by a supporter of North during a live Q&A on Reddit, the Jean Monnet Chair of EU Law at the University of Liverpool, Michael Dougan, noted that North's "academic work on EU law" was not known to him as it was not published in the mainstream international peer-reviewed journals for the field of European legal studies. Dougan suggested further that it does not meet the "internationally recognised" standards for the discipline.[27]