Formation | July 2016 |
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Founders | Richard Tice, John Longworth |
Dissolved | 31 January 2020 |
Purpose | United Kingdom withdrawal from the European Union |
Headquarters | 55 Tufton Street, London |
Region served | United Kingdom |
Key people |
|
Website | leavemeansleave |
Part of a series of articles on |
Brexit |
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Withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union ContentsGlossary of terms |
Leave Means Leave was a pro-Brexit, [4] Eurosceptic political pressure group organisation that campaigned and lobbied [5] for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union following the 'Leave' result of the EU referendum on 23 June 2016. The campaign was co-chaired by British property entrepreneur Richard Tice and business consultant John Longworth. The vice-chairman was Leader of the Brexit Party, Nigel Farage.
The organisation has described itself as a ‘campaign for a clean Brexit’.
Co-founded by Richard Tice and John Longworth, according to the BBC, the organisation grew out of the Vote Leave campaign during the 2016 EU referendum. [6]
As of June 2020, following the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, the home page of the group's website declared that it had "achieved its aims when we left the EU on 31st January 2020". [7] The website was subsequently deactivated.
After a period of inactivity, the group's website was reactivated in 2022. As of July 2023, the group's website was still up and running. [8]
On 30 September 2017, during the Brexit negotiations, the campaign wrote a letter to Prime Minister Theresa May. [9] Four ex-cabinet members, including former Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Lawson, as well as former Brexit minister David Jones, [10] signed the letter alongside the rest of the board. [11] The letter highlighted concerns including support for considering a no-deal scenario. [12] [13]
The letter had multiple significant supporters outside of the organisation, including former Conservative leader Michael Howard, who said he shared its "aspirations". [14]
Nigel Farage and the Leave Means Leave campaign organised a march in 2019, setting off from Sunderland in the north east of England on 16 March and culminating in a rally in Parliament Square, London on 29 March, the date Brexit was originally due to occur. [15] [16] [17] [18]
The march set off from Sunderland on Saturday 16 March 2019 with roughly 100 marchers heading to Hartlepool led by Farage. [19] Supporters of Leave Means Leave had been asked to pay £50 to sponsor or to join the march from Sunderland to London and it had been claimed that more than 350 people had signed up although only 50 had agreed to walk for the full 14 days. [20] The marchers did not plan to walk the whole route. [20]
At the start of the march, Nigel Farage was quoted as saying: "We are here in the very week when parliament is doing its utmost to betray the Brexit result ... It is beginning to look like it doesn’t want to leave and the message from this march is if you think you can walk all over us we will march straight back to you.” [21]
The following day roughly 150 marchers headed to Middlesbrough but Farage did not participate. [22] Farage rejoined the march the following Saturday in Nottinghamshire attended by roughly 200 marchers, [23] drawing unfavourable comparisons to the hundreds of thousands attending the anti-Brexit People's Vote March in London on the same day. [24] [25]
The March for Leave then proceeded through Leicestershire and Buckinghamshire with its numbers reduced to around 100. [26] [27]
The march was accompanied throughout by an advertising truck displaying anti-Brexit messages paid for by the Led By Donkeys campaign. [28] [29]
On 29 March, the march arrived in Central London, to join the Leave Means Leave rally in Parliament Square. [30] The rally was reported to have attracted "thousands" of supporters. [31] [32] The Financial Times quoted their reporter Sebastian Payne as stating that the crowd size was "a couple of thousand". [33] Speakers included Brexit Party chairman, Richard Tice, businessman John Longworth, broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer, Spiked editor Brendan O'Neill, Labour MP Kate Hoey, Wetherspoons founder Tim Martin, writer Claire Fox, Conservative MPs Peter Bone and Mark Francois and DUP MP Ian Paisley Jr. [34]
A separate pro-Brexit "Make Brexit Happen" rally, organised by the UKIP party formerly led by Farage, was also held nearby. [35]
Nigel Paul Farage is a British broadcaster and former politician who was Leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) from 2006 to 2009 and 2010 to 2016 and Leader of the Brexit Party from 2019 to 2021. He served as Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for South East England from 1999 until the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union in 2020. He was the host of The Nigel Farage Show, a radio phone-in on the Global-owned talk radio station LBC, from 2017 to 2020. Farage is currently the Honorary President of Reform UK and a presenter for GB News.
David Campbell Bannerman is a British Conservative Party politician who served as Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the East of England from 2009 to 2019. He is currently Chairman of The Freedom Association. He served as Deputy Leader of UK Independence Party (UKIP) from 2006 until 2010, when he was replaced by Paul Nuttall.
Claire Regina Fox, Baroness Fox of Buckley, is a British writer, journalist, lecturer and politician who sits in the House of Lords as a non-affiliated life peer. She is the director and founder of the think tank the Academy of Ideas.
On 23 June 2016, a referendum, commonly referred to as the EU referendum or the Brexit referendum, took place in the United Kingdom (UK) and Gibraltar to ask the electorate whether the country should remain a member of, or leave, the European Union (EU). It was organised and facilitated through the European Union Referendum Act 2015 and the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. The referendum resulted in 51.9% of the votes cast being in favour of leaving the EU. Although the referendum was legally non-binding, the government of the time promised to implement the result.
Arron Fraser Andrew Banks is a British businessman and political donor. He is the co-founder of the Leave.EU campaign. Banks was previously one of the largest donors to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and helped Nigel Farage's campaign for Britain to leave the EU.
The 2019 European Parliament election was the United Kingdom's component of the 2019 European Parliament election, held on Thursday 23 May 2019 and the results were announced on Sunday 26 and Monday 27 May 2019, after all the other EU countries had voted. This was the United Kingdom's final participation in a European Parliament election before leaving the European Union on 31 January 2020, and was also the last election to be held under the provisions of the European Parliamentary Elections Act 2002 before its repeal under the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018.
Vote Leave was a campaigning organisation that supported a "Leave" vote in the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. On 13 April 2016 it was designated by the Electoral Commission as the official campaign in favour of leaving the European Union in the Referendum.
Leave.EU was a political campaign group that was first established to support the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union in the June 2016 referendum. Founded in July 2015 as The Know, the campaign was relaunched in September of that year with its name changed to "Leave.eu" to reflect altered wording in the referendum question.
John Longworth is a British business consultant and politician. He was the director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce from September 2011 until March 2016, when he departed in controversy by breaking with the organisation's line on Brexit on the day of its conference.
Richard James Sunley Tice is a multi-millionaire British businessman and right-wing politician who has been leader of Reform UK since 6 March 2021.
The Hug A Brit movement was an independent social media campaign around the British EU membership referendum in June 2016.
Best for Britain is a civil society campaign, launched on 26 April 2017, to stop Brexit and continue the UK's membership of the European Union (EU). Since 2021, the organisation's aim has changed to encourage greater internationalism rather than an immediate push to rejoin the EU.
Lord Buckethead is a satirical political candidate who has stood in four British general elections since 1987, portrayed by several individuals. He poses as an intergalactic villain similar to the Star Wars character Darth Vader.
Since the United Kingdom's vote to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum, a number of demonstrations have taken place and organisations formed whose goal has been to oppose, reverse or otherwise impede that decision.
Femi Oluwole is a British political activist and co-founder of the pro-European Union advocacy group Our Future Our Choice (OFOC). He has appeared as an activist and commentator on British television. He has written for The Independent, The Guardian and The Metro.
Reform UK is a right-wing populist political party in the United Kingdom. It was founded with support from Nigel Farage in November 2018 as the Brexit Party, advocating hard Euroscepticism and a no-deal Brexit and was a significant political force in 2019. After Brexit, it was renamed to Reform UK in January 2021, and became primarily an anti-lockdown party during the COVID-19 pandemic. Subsequently, in December 2022, it began campaigning on broader right-wing populist themes during the British cost-of-living crisis. As the Brexit Party, it gained 29 seats and the largest share of the national vote in the 2019 European Parliament election.
Led By Donkeys is a British political campaign group, established in December 2018 as an anti-Brexit group, but which has also criticised other actions of the Conservative government. Since the group's creation its four founders have been calling out what they call "thermonuclear hypocrisy" and used satire targeted at pro-Brexit politicians. Led By Donkeys' main campaign consists of billboards containing past tweets by pro-Brexit politicians, or quotes presented as tweets. These tweets state the politicians' previous political positions, which according to the group have not stood the test of time.
2010s political history refers to significant political and societal historical events in the United Kingdom in the 2010s, presented as a historical overview in narrative format.
The 2019 European Parliament election for the election of the delegation from the United Kingdom was held on May 23, 2019. These were the last elections to the European Parliament to be held before Brexit.