SOMEONE has asked: "Please remind me of the benefits that will result when the UK withdraws from the EU, I’m having trouble remembering any of them."

Just one benefit will suffice. We will no longer contribute to the cost of the "Strasbourg travelling circus", the monthly transport of MEPs from Brussels to Strasbourg and back, for a four-day plenary session to satisfy French pride.

The EU admits it costs annually £93 million.

EU conservatives have totted up the real cost of moving 2000 lobbyists, officials and MEPs 300 miles by train there and back - a staggering £130 million, or in each EU seven-year budgetary cycle that’s £928 million, for something they openly admit is entirely unnecessary!

Does anyone realise what that amount of money will do for orphans in Africa?

The EU is obsessed with climate change, yet they embarrassingly admit 10,200 tonnes of CO2 would be saved each year if this monthly farce were to cease. That’s equivalent to 12,000 cars driving round the circumference of the globe.

The Strasbourg circus has become a symbol of EU waste and stupidity, and still it goes on.

We do a lot of daft things in our Britishness, but this nonsense is one reason why 17 million of us decided our support for it had to stop.

It’s time we called an "Extinction of Common Sense Emergency". Give me a flag and I’ll wave it every day, not just on a Friday.

Raymond Hall

Cockermouth