AS one of those slated by Goddard in his politically-motivated letter last week, I respond to his points.

After decades of preaching how good it was to be in the EU, the press realise that we have been conned. It is a fact, not fiction, that for the UK the EU is very poor value for money, as is foreign aid to countries where, because of corruption, the money does not reach those for whom it was intended, such as the ‘ghost schools’ in Pakistan that our aid funds, recently reported in the press and on TV.

Goddard has missed the point of UKIP altogether (possibly intentionally).

We want to face the world far more than we do through the EU. The EU is a shrinking economy, it is the Far East and Brazil, Russia, India and China whose economies are expanding yet we are curtailed in trading with them by the EU.

Out of the EU, as the sixth largest world economy, Britain would thrive and prosper.

I laughed on reading about the CBI. In the EU big companies can avoid our taxes by registering their head offices in Luxembourg or Ireland, so it’s understandable why they like the EU.

Lord Digby Jones, the most famous former CBI director, spoke at the last UKIP conference and he advocates leaving the EU, saying free trade deals will be in place within 23 hours so that they can still export cheaply to us.

On the issue of Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants, it’s too early to call. We have no statistics yet about the numbers who arrived before January 1 and the bad weather has obviously delayed the travel plans of others. But no doubt when the spring comes and farms need cheap labour, that will be the time to calculate the statistics.

Peter Sumner, Coachways, Andover