A PERNICIOUS myth has finally been laid to rest. From today, nobody can claim any longer that British business is united in its support of the European Union and the ever-greater centralisation of powers in Brussels. With over 500 business people – from top FTSE 100 bosses to entrepreneurs – signing up to Business for Britain, a campaign to renegotiate the UK’s membership of the EU, Euroscepticism has truly gone mainstream.

The idea that only idiots or xenophobes could possibly question the euro or the EU’s economic and democratic viability – an ubiquitous argument in the 1990s – ceased to be tenable with the onset of the Eurozone crisis, which has been playing out almost exactly how sceptics such as Harvard’s Martin Feldstein predicted it would many years ago.