Richard Anthony Edward North (born 1948) is a British blogger and author. He has published books on defence and agriculture. He was previously the research director in the European Parliament for the now-defunct political grouping Europe of Democracies and Diversities, which included the UK Independence Party (UKIP).
North has collaborated with the late journalist Christopher Booker on climate change, public health and other issues. He co-wrote a number of books with Booker, and collaborated with Booker's journalism.
Background
North had "a brief career in the Royal Air Force" before becoming a local government officer, and then for two decades ran his own consultancy business. A 1994 contribution to the Institute of Economic Affairs's journal Economic Affairs described him as "an independent food safety adviser". "He then moved into trade politics and thence to the European Parliament as research director for the group of European Democracies and Diversities", a grouping of eurosceptic political groups which existed from 1999 to 2004, in which the UK Independence Party (UKIP) participated. At the European Parliament in Strasbourg, North shared an office with UKIP's leader Nigel Farage.
He completed a PhD on public sector food-poisoning surveillance at Leeds Metropolitan University in the 1990s.
North stood for the Referendum Party in the 1997 election, in South Derbyshire, having joined the party in 1996. In the 2004 European elections, North was UKIP's number one candidate on the party list for the Yorkshire region, until he was supplanted by Godfrey Bloom, who won a seat. North later resigned from UKIP, describing his service for the party as "optimism, descending into frustration, to disillusionment and to betrayal".
European Union
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.
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.
Flexcit
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. 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.