How Mr Denton-White rants! Perhaps he can tell us, for I would like to know, what is it about the EU that engenders such rabid diatribes?

It is not nostalgia for a lost empire that enrages many people, including myself, about the EU – it is that we were conned into it at the start and we are constantly subjected to the dictats of an unelected commission and greedy officials. Huge and mad expenses such as the removal down to the last paperclip of the parliament (populated by people who turn up to claim their attendance fees and then disappear) from Brussels to Strasburg and back again twice a year.

A hugely expensive organisation that has, amongst other things, overseen the ruination of our fisheries and our traditions of common law. Corrupt from top to bottom; why are we still tied to it and what is there to be so enthusiastic about?

It may not have issued directives about straight bananas but it has certainly created an environment in which the petty bureaucrats and jobsworths who do make such rules can flourish.

Thanks to the EU we have to allow people, even doctors, to freely come here to work when they are barely literate in their own languages.

And please, Mr White, don’t try that argument about ‘making war impossible’ because I’m convinced that unless it is reformed the EU will eventually collapse like the old Soviet Union, and for the same reasons. And when it does the countries of Europe will fight over the remains as the Serbs, Macedonians and Bosnians fought over the remains of Yugoslavia. We can only hope that Britain will retain enough independence to stay aloof from that conflict.

J Neimer, Cranford Avenue, Weymouth