ABSTRACT
Hostility towards British association with Europe has a long historic pedigree in the Conservative Party. Sometimes associated with the ‘Little Englander’ mentality, since 1945 it has manifested itself under different labels, anti-European, anti-Marketeer and Eurosceptic. The personnel involved in Conservative Euroscepticism have changed over the past sixty years. Their arguments have evolved to take account of Britain’s changed international position. Although there is no single Eurosceptic position the core themes of scepticism have remained constant. The debate has a natural division point, 1975. This was the year of the referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the EC. Until this event the Eurosceptics were fighting to prevent either British membership or some alternative form of closer political and economic association with continental Europe. Thereafter, they were obliged to accept membership of the EC and work from within the system to seek to reduce the EC’s encroachment. The apparent abdication of Thatcher to Europe with the Single European Act appeared to suggest that adherence to scepticism was a wasted venture. In 1986 John Biffen, an implacable opponent of EC membership in the 1970s, guided the Single European Act through its guillotine stage in the House of Commons. It suggested there was no future in scepticism. But just as it appeared that the SEA was to be the death knell of scepticism it proved to be its phoenix.
