Surely the long-term future for our children is more important than the immediate future, so what is best for the long term? We are already lumbering our children with an ever-growing debt, and pitiful interest rates which hinder saving for the ever more expensive housing.

We have a birthright of a fair legal system and a democratic system of government with checks and balances and which can be changed at the next election. Will we pass it on or dump it for short term gain?

Unless we join the Euro club which is moving to full economic union, we are second class citizens in the EU, and as more countries join we will have less and less influence on the way it develops.

Those in the club will most often vote in favour of the members. They will be want to keep in with the core countries, particularly Germany, which will have an increasing influence/perhaps dominance. So we will be outvoted by qualified majority voting. The idea that we will have much influence is just a pipe dream.

The EU concept of ever closer union, a one size to fit all countries, has already shown to be a failed concept in the Euro catastrophe, yet the plans are for more of the same. Plans are already being made for the common foreign and security policy; with a federal army navy and air force. A federal legal system, so goodbye to the Magna Carta and the rights won for us since then.

Our armed forces will have to swear allegiance to a non-elected EU president. They may have to fight in a war which we do not agree with.

The backers of the In campaign, big business, big American banks, the EU and economists gave us the same doom predictions if we did not join the Euro; they were wrong, why should we listen to them now?

If we stay in the EU a plan nearly 50 years in the making will have come to pass. We will be bound to a broken EU superstate in ways we can never undo. Your children and your grandchildren will live in a country controlled by Brussels.

We rightly handed sovereignty to the commonwealth countries. Are we going to give up our own sovereignty?

A Europe of freely cooperating democratic countries is the best for Europe, not a bureaucratic dictatorship.

Peter Storey

Kendal