CLLR Fletcher will not get into trouble for confusing reality with the European Union and his shameless use of statistics was roundly debunked over 100 years ago, attributed to both Samuel Clemens and Benjamin Disraeli, the aphorism (and axiom), “there are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics,”

meaning that any argument promoted this way has no basis in fact.

Also his ‘bonus’, (from EU membership), of limitless travel within this zone, has been noticed by a comparably limitless number of economic migrants and illegal immigrants.

As regards what ‘Priority One’ really is paraphrased in the words of the ever irrepressibly rambunctious William Jefferson Clinton: “It is the economy, stupid.”

Yet for many in the UK the penny has yet to drop: the reason that the UK’s economy is currently doing so well, is specifically down to the fact that we are outside the ‘euro’ zone, while precisely because they are saddled with the ‘single currency’, the economies of most of the other countries in the EU eurozone, are not just flatlining, they are sliding into the economic abyss known as ‘deflation’.

Whither UK democracy, when MPs elected to the Westminster parliament have their legislative function subordinated to un-elected civil servants in Brussels? Tam Dalyell’s ‘West Lothian’ question writ large or the rallying call of another plan of escape from sterile overarching authority, shortly before 1776 – “no taxation without representation?”

In every way the unelected EU bureaucrats and their unrepresentative coat-tail-riders in the UK need to display a lot more respect for national and international borders.

Paddy Keenan, Ward Close, Andover