Manchester anti-Brexit protest for Conservative conference, October 1, 2017. Credit: Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
On the first day of October 2018 I did something I’d never done before: I went to the UK Conservative party conference in Birmingham. The theme of the event I attended was ‘Chuck Chequers’ – a reference to Prime Minister Theresa May’s controversial plan for Brexit. It was organised by the Bruges Group, which takes its inspiration from a speech made by Margaret Thatcher in Bruges in 1988. The most quoted part of that speech was her statement that "We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level."
