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When the EU wanted to extend its jurisdiction into social policy and employment law, it needed the permission of all member states. The UK opposed the move but eventually agreed to allow the others to go ahead, using the institutions of the EU, provided there was a legal guarantee that Britain would not be forced to join in. The moment the ink was dry on that guarantee, the then eleven other states began to agitate to extend their rules to the UK. Because Britain had an opt-out on social and employment policy, they reintroduced the main pillar of that policy - a directive regulating paid holidays, maximum weekly working times and the like - as a 'health and safety' measure (the 1993 Working Time Directive). The Major government protested that the measure was plainly social policy rather than health and safety - it allowed employees to work more than forty-eight hours a week, provided they were given overtime - but the ECJ decided that health and safety didn't just mean being safe at work: it also meant looking after the 'social well-being' of employees.

Britain was doubly penalized by the Common Agricultural Policy: as a net food importer with an efficient farming sector, she was hit both positively and negatively, paying more in and getting less back. She was, of course, uniquely deleteriously impacted by the Common Fisheries Policy which, for the next thirty years, did not apply to the Mediterranean or the Baltic, but only to the North Sea. It was, in other words, an overtly anti-British policy.

The implications for sovereignty were not simply minimized, they were expressly denied. In a television broadcast to mark Britain's formal accession to the EEC in 1973, the prime minister declared: 'There are some in this country who fear that in going into Europe we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty. These fears, I need hardly say, are completely unjustified.'3 That statement has been thrown back at the Conservative Party ever since. People felt, with reason, that they had been deceived by their leaders, that they had joined on a false premise. Instead of becoming members of what they had assumed to be a free market, based on the unrestricted circulation of goods and mutual recognition of products, they had joined a quasi-state which was in the process of acquiring all the machinery of democratic representation and legal coercive power.

Britain has paid more into the EU budget than she has received back in forty-one out of forty-two years of membership (the exception, tellingly, being 1975: the year of the referendum on withdrawal). Indeed, for most of those forty-two years, there were only two net contributors: Britain and Germany.

Why, though, is Britain so often in a category of her own? Why does she have such little sway with the other states? Is it because Britons are naturally unpopular? Is there some Eurovision Song Contest-style prejudice against us? Are we resented, on some deep psychological level, for having won the Second World War?