Re: Nigel Farage
Originally Posted by
Rainmaker
->
I think you have the wrong man Joe. Goldsmith founded The Referendum Party. UKIP was founded by Alan Sked, who was succeeded by Nigel Farage. It was and still is an Anti-federalist party, which is not quite what you would have us believe is it?
Get it right will you I said
SPAWNED not founded!!!
The Referendum Party
In the early 1990s, with the removal of Margaret Thatcher from the United Kingdom's Prime Ministerial office by the Tories, and their enactment into law of the Maastricht Treaty, Goldsmith, who up until that time had retained close links with the Conservative Party, came to the conclusion that it was no longer a serious political vehicle to oppose the European Union's advancing power, and that opposition would have to be created within the party political system beyond its current order of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrats parties, all of which supported the United Kingdom's incorporation into the European Union.[Note 1]
In consequence, in 1994 Goldsmith founded and financed The Referendum Party in the United Kingdom, modeled upon the Majorité pour l'autre Europe, with the objective of seeking a referendum for its national withdrawal from the European Union, which would go on to stand candidates in the country's General Election of 1997. As the mid-1990s progressed Goldsmith involved himself in British politics, appearing with increasing regularity in the political press, and in domestic political televised debates, raising opposition to the nature of the European Union and what he perceived was mainstream media culpability in playing down its supranational ambitions, and pouring scorn on a Westminster parliamentary political order that he stated had failed the nation and was now willfully betraying its governmental sovereignty.[28]
During the 1997 electoral campaign Goldsmith had mailed to approximately five million homes a VHS video cassette film to allow him to address the electorate free from the editorial control of the nation's mainstream media, having previously rejected the idea of by-passing the United Kingdom's legal restrictions on the broadcast of political information by the means of an offshore radio station named "Referendum Radio".[29]