The Bruges Group expresses our deep and heartfelt sadness at the loss of our President, Baroness Thatcher. She was our greatest peacetime Prime Minister and a Standard Bearer for freedom, prosperity and democracy who changed the course of British history. Baroness Margaret Thatcher exposed the folly of European integration and argued that there was an alternative to the European Union. She warned:
‘That such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European superstate was ever embarked upon will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era. And that Britain, with her traditional strengths and global destiny, should ever have been part of it will appear a political error of historic magnitude. There is, though, still time to choose a different and a better course.’
The Bruges Group was founded in 1989 to turn her vision for Britain and Europe into a political reality. The Group is named after her famous Bruges Speech, to the College of Europe in Bruges, where she said;
“We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”
We express our sincere condolences to her family.