IN my letter re the Euro debate a few weeks ago I pleaded for a rational debate, free of the sort of abusive paranoia that so often characterises anti-European tirades.

In Roger Mathew’s letter of April 7, his statement that ‘Britain’s 900-year Constitution has no need of supervision by an Empire of Babel cobbled together by johnny-come lately continental confabulations. By leaving, we have nothing to lose but the chains with which they conspire to bind us’ is a good example of the sort of stuff I mean.

Nobody is plotting to bind us with anything. That is just nonsense and Britain has not and never has had a written constitution. People like me are not part of a conspiracy and are not anti-British, nor are we having the wool pulled over our eyes by a gang of foreigners. We just believe that Britain is better off as part of a powerful grouping of nations, for reasons that are to do with external relations, environmental concerns, security, employment, prosperity and international influence.

There are many and complex issues (the effect of leaving the EU on the Common Fisheries policy, the effect on farmers who depend on European subsidies and migrant workers, the effect on the NHS, employment rights, environmental issues, etc, etc) but escaping from the wicked clutches of a band of voracious bureaucrats is not one of them.

If Mr Mathew and people who think like him are worried about democracy, how about looking at what is going on at home? Where was the democratic mandate for the academisation of all our schools? Who voted for the upheaval of the NHS?

Dorothy Kirk

Gunnislake