Contributions 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. North's blog, eureferendum.com, reached third place on the
Technorati list of most influential blogs in the UK for 2006. 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. Furthermore, he claimed that Wikipedia's "wrong" coverage of climate change, of which North is a notable
denier, proved the need for such endeavors. It has been claimed by
Andrew Orlowski of
The Register that Flexcit became a point of reference for civil servants. Flexcit argues that exit from the EU is "a process rather than an event", so advocating a phased repatriation of powers, which has been described as "Brexit lite". 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. 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. 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. 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.
Reception of the academic community The EU politics writer and blogger
J. Clive Matthews has argued that North is guilty of "pandering to his audience’s preconceptions and prejudices". 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". 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". 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". 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". 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. ==Health==