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John Boyd, 1934-2024
Tony Donaghey remembers a lifelong campaigner who fought tirelessly against the EU and for the right of nations to self-determination, with a fundamental belief in what ordinary working people could achieve by themselves
John Boyd

DEMOCRAT, internationalist and peace campaigner John Boyd has passed away at the age of 89. Boyd was active in the Connolly Association in the 1970s and was influenced by Desmond Greaves, editor of the Irish Democrat.

Greaves invited Boyd to write about the deindustrialisation of Britain under Tory leader Margaret Thatcher and her then ardent support for this country’s membership of the then Common Market. Boyd went on to contribute a regular column in the Irish Democrat on the subject.

Following the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, which massively centralised power within the European Union in 1992, he helped found the Campaign Against Euro-Federalism (CAEF), which sought to win British labour and trade union opinion to oppose supranational EU integration.

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