FOR all my 40 or so years as a professional statistician, I’ve explained, with varying degrees of patience, that forecasts are never precise, but if they’re constructed well will indicate the relative likelihood of each of the range of outcomes they provide.

With this in mind, and taking all the issues together, there’s only one way to vote in the referendum. The issues:

•Economy and finance – every respected expert group: (IFS, OECD, Bank of England, IMF and so on) concludes that in the near and medium term we’re likely to be better off staying in the EU than leaving, and, even in the long term, leaving is unlikely to be preferable to staying.

•Immigration – stopping free movement by leaving the EU wouldn’t change our need for additional labour, from doctors to temporary farm workers.

Nor would blockading our borders change the pressure from illegal immigrants attempting to get here.

But it would hamper the prospects of our young people seeking work in Europe and all those UK citizens already working in the rest of Europe.

So leaving the EU would probably have very little impact on the numbers of immigrants, legal or illegal, reaching our shores.

The way to ease the undoubted problems that they are causing to some areas of Britain is surely to build more houses, schools and hospitals.

But damaging our economy by leaving the EU is going to make that harder.

•Democracy – the stages of control within the EU are: commissioners (chosen by each democratically elected member state), council of ministers (one from each democratically elected mem-

ber state), members of European parliament (voted for democratically within each member state – unfortunately many of the UK MEPs are more interested in undermining the UK’s membership than forming constructive alliances with other member states, while at the same time pocketing large salaries and expenses).

It’s beyond dispute that the EU desperately needs reform.

While we’re in it we can help with this; outside it we could do nothing.

•Sovereignty and law-making – following a ’leave’ vote, nothing would really change for us.

Individually we would have no greater influence on British laws then than now.

It’s not a case of ’taking back control from the EU’, what matters is whether the laws under which we live are sensible or not.

•Benefits – directly in cash terms: the rebate the UK receives and subsidies (for example agricultural payments). Indir-

ectly: community-wide sharing of scientific work, education, environmental standards, and cultural activities; workers’ rights, shared intelligence to counteract crime and terrorism, EU-wide trade agreements with other countries, common standards (not red tape – only a fool would insist on reverting to pounds and ounces, feet and inches, degrees Fahrenheit, and so on); health service arrangements; the list is endless.

•Global influence – the majority of leaders and opinion-formers throughout the world argue that Britain’s influence from within the EU is very important, and that outside the EU it would be greatly diminished.

Supporters of Brexit seem to include only Trump, Putin and Marine Le Pen, the French fascist leader, hardly a convincing argument?

•Peace-keeping – from the time the idea of a European Community was first proposed it was recognised by wartime leaders such as Churchill that co-operation and diplomacy was preferable to dispute.

All of the above arguments, and Brexiteers’ unconvincing dismissals of every forecast they don’t like on the grounds that the forecasters’ track records have been variable, point in the same direction.

If we leave now there’s no way back. Stay and the possibility of leaving remains.

For our own sakes and the futures of our children and grandchildren we should all vote to remain in now.

– David Norman, Blaisdon.