BEFORE crashing us into the Common Market, Edward Heath went skidding out of control and kept on hitting things.

What we had accepted as our own he took away: our traditions, our culture, our way of life; and he denied us what we had been taught at school.

He hit our currency and made us change from British to decimal, he hit our weights and measures and made us change from imperial to metric, and he hit our temperature scales and made us change from fahrenheit to celsius.

In doing so he caused a lot of people, especially the elderly, an awful amount of trauma and distress.

He also changed our road signs from British to continental at tremendous  unnecessary expense.

He would have switched to driving on the right, as Sweden did, if the cost for doing that in Britain had not been so enormous.

He would have had British Summer Time going all year round if he hadn’t had the facts of geography thrown at him.

All these things he did just to show the Europeans what a good little Europhile he was.

He always put Europe first, Britain last.

 Now his theories have been put to the test.

The EU is so unsuitable for British membership that the British people, having tried it out for 40 years, have found it isn’t good enough for Britain and have decided to ditch it.

I recently issued a challenge whereby anybody able to claim there are benefits of our membership should say so.

No one was able to.

All they could come up with were international arrangements and agreements which could have been brought into existence without the EU.

Nor does it need an EU to tell us to clean our beaches, we could make such laws ourselves.

One EU law, however, was put into effect as the Data Protection Act.

This ridiculous law is both useless and dangerous.

It is useless because it fails to prevent companies from exchanging mailing lists without the permission of the people listed on them.

It is dangerous because, as shown in the case of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, it prevented one police force from notifying another they had a murderer at their school.

Finally, the best we can hope for now is that we leave the EU on the basis of No Deal.

The deal Theresa May has come up with is totally unacceptable, not only because of the utter repugnancy of the backstop, but because she had no right to make any kind of deal with the EU anyway.

The subject of making deals was not mentioned on either the referendum campaign for either side, nor was it ever mentioned on the ballot form.

How dare these politicians deny us our own independence.

The EU is a dictatorship from whom the British have at last fought for, and won, independence.

That is what No Deal is – independence.

– Anthony Reeve, Littledean.