I’ve read some increasingly bizarre claims of benefits of our EU membership, but hats off to Mr D Craig in last week’s paper.

As I’ve discovered from much research, HM government cannot be trusted on the matter of the EU as it was our civil servants working with Jean Monnet and others who plotted the path to the current federated superstate – in agreed secrecy – as far back as the 1930s They have, unwaveringly, taken an ardent pro-EU line and advised ministers accordingly.

When the House of Commons held a debate in October 2011 on putting a referendum of our EU membership to the people, the Commons’ parliamentary resources unit issued a brief of positive points to make for members to take in the debate. I can’t find a document that takes an opposing view. The outlandish claims contained in the letter cannot be supported by any discernible facts that I can derive from searching and a lengthy tract from HM Treasury was included.

As always, this propounds the single market as being of the prime importance starting a sentence with: “Outside the EU our worrying trade imbalance....” I have tried, from various organisations, to derive an accurate figure for our trade deficit/surplus with the EU since joining 40 years ago. Astonishingly, no-one keeps such a figure – a response I find incredibly hard to believe. I know in one year – 2008 – that we exported £6 billion of food to EU countries and imported £16 billion – a £10 billion trade deficit in one year on food, a tiny proportion of our economy. The economist Professor Tim Congdon has estimated it to be a £450 billion deficit – a figure not disputed by any serious research.

I leave the last word to the economist Ruth Lea, a director and economic adviser at the Arb-uthnot Banking Group. She wrote that: “There is a great deal of misunderstanding about the nature of the single market, with its four freedoms of goods, services, capital and labour. It is frequently interpreted in the UK as equivalent to a free trade area. But this is not the case. The single market comes with a big price ticket in the form of extensive, intrusive and expensive regulations intended to harmonise the economies of the EU. These regulations range from the generalised employment and environmental regulations to industry specific rules. “They impose large costs on British businesses, putting them at a clear competitive disadvantage with businesses outside the EU.”

Steven Morson, Bromsgrove