Thank you for the clarification. But there were always special arrangements allowed in the EU. Britain never accepted the Euro as its currency and chose to keep the Pound. I believe the UK could have made a similar case for other issues like trade deals outside the EU but didn’t want to fight for it. Eventually the EU morphed into a bureaucratic monster that became dominated by the Germans to the detriment of most everyone else. Its a mess that its remaining member countries are going to struggle to manage. Wait until President Trump lowers the boom on the EU like he did to China. It’ll be great to see!
That's the perception assiduously propagated by the Europhobe British media for many years; a perception which successive British governments didn't try too hard to counter, since it was easy to blame the EU for unpopular measures which were actively or passively assented to, and in many case actually originated, by the British government of the day.
The reality is somewhat more nuanced. Here's a nice anecdotal observation of Britain's influence in the EU by a (relatively) neutral observer: an Irish diplomat who represented his country at the EU for many years, and was able to watch at close quarters how his British opposite numbers operated: