Conservatives for Britain is aEurosceptic political pressure group within theConservative Party of theUnited Kingdom.
The group's co chairmen areDavid Campbell Bannerman, a Conservative member of theEuropean Parliament who had previously served as deputy leader of theUK Independence Party, andSteve Baker, a backbench Conservative member of parliament at Westminster. Other leaders includeNigel Lawson, the group's president, andNorman Lamont, both former cabinet ministers now in theHouse of Lords.
The group was founded early in June 2015, shortly after the dust had settled on the Britishgeneral election held on 7 May.[1]
On 8 October 2015, Conservatives for Britain announced its support for theVote Leave campaign in thereferendum on British membership of the EU, stressing in a statement the importance of establishing "a professional, mainstream cross party campaign that can fight the referendum if the EU fails to allow fundamental change".[2]
The Daily Telegraph reported on the new group's formation under the heading "50 Tories plot Britain's EU exit".[1]The Guardian greeted it with the headline "Meet the new 'bastards' – the Tories' fifty strong awkward squad",[3] referring to a famous outburst byJohn Major in the 1990s.
On 11 June, Campbell Bannerman was reported as predicting that most Tory members of the European Parliament would join the group, but he stressed that it was not at that point an "Out" campaign.[4]
In January 2016, the group's co chairman in the parliamentary Conservative party wasSteve Baker, who described the group thus:
Conservatives for Britain is a group of Conservative Party members who: Consider the UK’s present relationship with the EU to be untenable; take an optimistic, globalist view of the UK’s future; support the Party’s policy of renegotiation and referendum based on the Wharton Bill franchise and question; wish to explore what objectives the negotiations must achieve to ensure that they meet the PM’s objective, “to reform the EU and fundamentally change Britain’s relationship with it” (PM, Hansard, Col 1122, 23 March 2015); and will discuss how to prepare for a possible “out” campaign, to be activated if it is apparent that negotiations will not achieve the objectives.[5]
