In the words of the Dominic Frisby song (still one of our favourite podcast guests):
On the 23rd of June in 2016
The people of the United Kingdom – and Gibraltar – went to vote
On an issue that for some had been burning for years
The question in full – and unaltered – was – I quote
Should the United Kingdom remain
a member of the European Union
or leave the European Union?
We all know how that went and we eventually if imperfectly did leave the EU. This group grew out of the Vote Leave campaign in Croydon, although when we started Vote Leave wasn’t the designated leave group and during the campaign we used material from them, Grassroots Out, Leave.EU, Better Off Out, The Bruges Group, locally sourced and any other viable leave campaign we could. Sadly many of the articles from the time have disappeared into the ether but from memory we distributed about 150,000 leaflets, held about 40 street stalls and held around 7 public meetings. Videos from a street stall and a public meeting are still online.
Whilst we lost in Croydon we won nationally. The 3 constituencies then in Croydon voted as follows, Croydon North 41.2% Leave, Croydon Central 50.3% Leave (note to then MP Gavin Barwell maybe don’t insult the majority of your voters), and Croydon South 45.8% Leave. At a council ward level we saw, Coulsdon East (53.54%), Fieldway (62.01%), Heathfield (52.18%), New Addington (64.8%), Selhurst (52.32%) all vote Leave. Ashburton was an exact 50%/50% split with 3,885 votes for both Leave and Remain, whilst Shirley and Bensham Manor both voted over 49% Leave.
After the referendum aside from occasional drinks initially we mostly went back to our political parties or more sensibly avoided active politics. This group started out looking forward to our Opportunities outside the EU, with a meeting which included a speech from Croydon South MP Chris Philp.
Unfortunately, it soon became clear that Theresa May and a great number of MPs in the treacherous parliament wanted to betray our democratic vote. So once again we were back out campaigning with multiple events including street stalls in Thornton Heath, Addiscombe and Croydon, and leafleting again in Addiscombe, Wallington and Caterham to apply pressure on anti-democracy MPs in those areas. Through all the campaigns we had attracted more foreign media coverage than local. As we ramped up to the 2019 Brexit election we were interviewed by The Globe and Mail, Canada’s “newspaper of record”.
Then finally on the 31st January 2020 at 11:00 pm we left the EU. Peter Sonnex Brexit Party Candidate for Croydon Central wrote about the election campaign, and may of you wrote on your hopes and predictions for the future over 7 pages of short interviews at the end of transition. We also had the great pleasure of a podcast interview with the sadly recently departed, Simon Richards, the former CEO of The Freedom Association who started the Better Off Out campaign.
10 years on we want to thank all of you who contributed to our campaign locally, and all of you who took a stand for our sovereignty and freedom as a nation.
The 10 year anniversary of the Brexit vote has coincided with the World Cup and The George in Croydon (our third Wednesday drinks stop) being closed for refurbishment. We will get drinks up and running again soon, do come along and raise a glass to all we helped achieve together.
You can learn more about those nationally keeping a watchful eye on Brexit from the recent Brexit Unleased event in London videos viewable at https://www.youtube.com/@tfa4freedom/videos, reading the Britain Unbound website https://britain-unbound.org/ and by following our Facebook page running for over 10 years at https://www.facebook.com/LeaveEUCroydonSuttonLambeth.
