ABSTRACT
Why had British opinion on the EU moved from being well into the range
of the so-called permissive consensus in 1990-1 to being quite close to
supporting withdrawal in 2006? It might be supposed that the answer to this
question would be quite simple: the British disliked the policies of the EU,
in particular the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), and the excessive
regulation from Brussels, and the idea of adopting the Euro, and were
unimpressed by the corruption and inefficiency of the EU institutions. But
the question also has to be put as to why the negative case about European policies and institutions was so much more persuasive than the positive one.
As explained in the previous chapter, there were certainly arguments in
favour of the policies and arrangements of the EU which went completely
unnoticed, and the scale of euro-corruption was much exaggerated. The
answer has to be that there were deeper, underlying reasons for negativity.
