The Bruges Group spearheaded the intellectual battle to win a vote to leave the European Union and, above all, against the emergence of a centralised EU state.
As an undergraduate at Oxford, Ariane Loening was old enough to vote NO in the 1975 EEC referendum.She gained experience of UN agencies and spent the 1980s in West Bengal working in the voluntary sector at grassroots level, developing a forensic approach to socio-political and economic issues before returning to Scotland in 1993. She values, in particular, knowledge of historical background, believing it to be the best way to understand the present.