Maastricht Rebels

The Maastricht Rebels were British members of parliament (MPs) belonging to the then governing Conservative Party who refused to support the government of John Major in a series of votes in the British House of Commons on the issue of the implementation of the Maastricht Treaty (Treaty on European Union) in British law.

The Maastricht Rebellion was a major event in the life of John Major's troubled 2nd term as Prime Minister (1992–1997). Major's party had a small majority, thus giving the relatively small number of rebels disproportionate influence: for example, there were 22 rebels on the second reading of the European Communities (Amendment) Bill in May 1992, and the government's majority at the time was only 18.

The rebellion (as Major later complained in his memoirs) had the support of the former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit. Thatcher declared in a speech in the House of Lords that she "could never have signed that Treaty".

At the height of the rebellion, the 1993 Christchurch by-election was held, where a Conservative majority of 23,000 was turned into a Liberal Democrat majority of 16,000. Conservative showings in opinion polls were as low as 23%. John Major threatened the rebels with a general election (despite one only being held a year earlier), which would probably have meant a severe defeat for the Conservative Party and a landslide victory for Labour, then led by John Smith.

The Labour Party brought-in heart attack victims and MPs who had just had surgery, the stretcher vote, to vote in an effort to bring the government down. The loyalists and rebels in the Conservative party also brought in their own stretcher vote; for example Bill Cash organised for one MP (Bill Walker) who was seriously ill to fly from Scotland secretly, then hid him at the rebels' headquarters in Great College Street, before, with Labour connivance, hiding him in the family room of the Commons so that the Conservative whips would not know; the government consequently lost a vote.

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