page_title: Referendum Party
section_title: Dissolution and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Referendum Party / Dissolution and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Nigel Farage.
context_page_description: The Referendum Party was a Eurosceptic, single-issue political party that was active in the United Kingdom from 1994 to 1997. The party's sole objective was for a referendum to be held on the nature of the UK's membership of the European Union. Specifically, it called for a referendum on whether the British electorate wanted to be part of a federal European state or to revert to being a sovereign nation that was part of a European free-trade bloc without wider political functions.
  The party was founded by the Anglo-French multi-millionaire businessman and politician James Goldsmith in November 1994. A Eurosceptic who had previously had close links to the UK's governing Conservative Party, he was also an elected Member of the European Parliament for the Movement for France party. He used his financial resources and contacts to promote the new venture, in which he was assisted by other former Conservatives. The party's structure was centralised and hierarchical, giving Goldsmith near-total control over its operations. Although not offering party membership, it claimed to have 160,000 registered "supporters", a number that was probably an exaggeration.
context_section_description: Immediately after the election, the Referendum Party renamed itself the Referendum Movement. Goldsmith had been suffering from pancreatic cancer, and had been warned that competing in the election would shorten his life. Goldsmith died in Benahavis, Spain, on 18 July 1997, and the party disbanded shortly afterwards. Some of its members transformed into the Democracy Movement, a pressure group closely associated with the former Conservative supporter and multi-millionaire businessman Paul Sykes. The Eurosceptic cause was weakened; with Blair's firmly pro-EU government in power, by 1998 the possibility of a referendum on the UK's membership of the EU was considered as distant as it had been in 1995.
  Under the direction of UKIP's leader Michael Holmes, the party's chairman Nigel Farage began recruiting former Referendum Party members to their own group; according to Farage, around 160 of the Referendum Party's candidates joined UKIP. Among those who did so was Jeffrey Titford, who later became one of UKIP's first MEPs. Other former members of the Referendum Party joined the Democratic Party, a small Eurosceptic group founded in 1998. In the 1999 Kensington and Chelsea by-election, one candidate stood under the banner of the now-defunct "Referendum Party"; they came eleventh, with 57 votes. In the 2001 general election, much of the support that had previously gone to the Referendum Party went not to UKIP but to the Conservatives, whose leader William Hague had employed Eurosceptic rhetoric throughout his campaign.
  Rupert Lowe, one of the Referendum Party's candidates in the 1997 general election, was elected as the Brexit Party's lead candidate for the West Midlands constituency in the 2019 European Parliament elections. James Glancy, another of the Brexit Party's MEPs, has compared the Brexit Party to the Referendum Party, being a "united and diverse group of people from different political backgrounds".
caption: UKIP Chairman Nigel Farage recruited many former Referendum Party candidates to his own party.
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