Madam,

The letter from Dr Naylor (10 March) makes exasperating reading. No-one is advocating stopping immigration. All that UKIP and others concerned about immigration are seeking is that who can and cannot come to the UK should be determined by the UK not by people abroad. Of course immigrants have brought a lot to the country. Of course we need immigrants to help with the health service and other areas where they have contributed and will contribute in the future. What we do not need is a crowd of unelected bureaucrats in another country telling us who we can and cannot allow into the UK. And how many times does the point have to be made that there is no such thing as EU money. It is our money some of which we get back from the EU with instructions how to spend it. Yes, at the moment Wales gets more back per capita than it pays in, but the UK as a whole pays in far more than it gets back. If we left the EU we would save around £50m a day to spend in the UK. It would be up to the UK government to decide how that is shared between Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland, but there would be a lot more to spend and only four parts of the UK to share it, not 27 other countries.

Dr Naylor seems to favour the Labour Party view of the matter. Their approach to EU membership appears to be based on the proposition that, because a democratically elected UK government (other than Labour) might scrap the various welfare benefits to which Dr Naylor refers, they would rather we were governed from abroad than by a democratically elected national government. Shame on them.The question we are being asked on 23 June is do we want the UK to govern itself or be governed from abroad. For me it is more difficult to decide what to have for lunch than to answer that question. To vote for the UK to be governed from abroad seems to me to relinquish sovereignty, undermine national democracy and self respect and to be unpatriotic. Finally how on earth does Dr Naylor come to the view that if we stay in the EU we can “help to make it even more effective”. We have had to endure the unedifying spectacle of our prime minister travelling round Europe cap in hand asking 27 other countries if it is okay for us to change our laws. He got nothing of substance, even under the threat that we would leave, and we will never get anything of substance. The EU is hell bent on political union and on enlargement, neither of which the UK wants and neither of which the UK will be able to stop. Since records began in 1996 the UK has tried 72 times to block proposals from the EU Com-mission and has failed every time. It is self evident that one voice among 28 has no power or control whatsoever and it will become even less the more countries that join.

Yours etc

Alan MacMaster

Barmouth.