Madam,

It is absolutely wrong for Dr Naylor to assert in his letter in last week’s Cambrian News that we control immigration because passports are checked when people enter the UK. One of the few things on which both sides in the EU debate agree, is that so long as we are in the EU we cannot control immigration. The border checks to which Dr Naylor refers are carried out to ensure people entering the UK are entitled to do so. The problem is that the rules governing who is entitled to do so are not made in the UK, they are made in Europe. As a result 500 million EU citizens are entitled to come and live here whether we like it or not. Hence the only way to regain control of who can and cannot come to the UK is to leave the EU.

About the only other thing which appears to be broadly agreed between both sides in the debate (despite Dr Naylor’s assertion) is that the UK pays around £50m a day to the EU. That is the gross payment and we do get some of it back, but the EU, not the UK, decides how the bit we get back is spent. If we leave, therefore, there would be £50m a day which we could spend in the UK on whatever the UK government chooses. If we do not like what the UK government spends that money on, we can elect a new government. We can’t do that in the EU because the Commission which makes the rules is unelected. Dr Naylor refers to various laws (from Brussels) which he thinks are good. Whether they are good or not is a matter of opinion. What concerns me is that they are mainly laws im-plementing what are essentially socialist policies. If the majority of the British electorate want a socialist society that is fine, but at the moment they don’t. They elected a Tory Government and so overall do not apparently want socialist policies. It is accepted by both sides to the argument that many of our laws and regulations emanate from Brussels. Business for Britain has estimated it at 65 per cent. UKIP say 75 per cent. The reason the referendum is so important is that it is not about individual rules and policies or about trade or the economy. It is much more fundamental a decision than that. It is about who makes and enforces the rules and decides who we want to trade with and on what terms. In other words who governs us. If the rules, whatever they are, are not made by the UK government and enforced by the UK courts then we are not a self-governing nation. How clear does it have to get that voting to remain in the EU involves giving away our freedom and democracy, and that of our children and grandchildren, to what is increasingly becoming a dictatorship with aims and values far removed from those of the UK and over which we have not the slightest control?

Yours etc

Alan MacMaster

Barmouth.