Don’t demonise Ukip voters for fearing tyranny of Europe

Mr Massie, I expect, has met very few Ukip members or voters to be able to make such statements. The worry to me, as a member of Ukip, is that the Westminster village, its tame press and the BBC want to paint ordinary people as if we have horns growing out of our heads, that we are racist and intolerant and want to go back to the Stone Age.

We are nothing of the sort. The millions of Eastern European immigrants who have come to the UK in the last few years have come mostly to England and Wales. It’s not racist to query why your grandson has to be bussed 20 miles to school, why the young can’t get any sort of social housing and end up in bed and breakfast accommodation, or to find that your hospital appointment, which you have been waiting for for months is cancelled twice at short notice because the NHS just can’t cope with the vast numbers who weren’t planned for, whose needs weren’t anticipated or were ignored.

Even taking all of the above into consideration, it wasn’t for any of those reasons that I joined Ukip. I joined in 2007 when the President of the European Commission hailed the European Union as an empire, saying: “We are a very special construction in the history of mankind. Sometimes I like to compare the EU as a creation of the organisation to the organisation of empire. We have the dimension of empire.”

I voted to get out of the EEC years ago when allowed to vote by Harold Wilson after Ted Heath took us in, and I am pretty confident that those who voted to stay in had no idea that the ultimate aim was an empire covering all of Europe.

Stuart Eels, Chippenham, Wiltshire