History
The Democracy Movement was founded by Lady Annabel Goldsmith in January 1999. She became its President and her son, businessman Robin Birley, served as the organisation's chairman until 2004. Democracy Movement originated from the ideas and campaign of the late James Goldsmith's Referendum Party in 1998. At its launch, describing the campaign as an effort "in memory of Jimmy", Lady Annabel said:
I'm not anti-European - my husband was half European and my children are a quarter French. I just don't want to be governed by Brussels, and I don't think people want to give up their sovereignty. Jimmy used to describe it as sitting at the top of the mountain watching a train crash - that was like us heading for the European superstate.
The DM is funded by donations from grassroots supporters although the Goldsmith family and the Eurosceptic businessman Paul Sykes have made large campaign donations in the past.
Read more about this topic: Democracy Movement
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)