STRAIGHT TALKING Forget Cam, our futures

FROM UKIP’S DEPUTY LEADER

IN 16 weeks’ time, every one of you will finally have the opportunity to decide upon the future of this great country.

On June 23, we have the chance to vote to get the UK out of the European Union – even though many people aren’t even sure what that means. So please allow me to try to explain. The EU is not something like China, a nation that’s been around for millennia, or the United States, a relative youngster at just 250 or so years old.

It isn’t even a country. It’s literally a talking shop, an organisation of men and women in suits, that the UK has only been part of since the 1970s.

The EU is basically a very large version of your local council – bigger, yes, but stuffed full of the same sort of bureaucrats.

You know the type – the ones who are great at closing your libraries and sacking your lollipop ladies but pretty bad at emptying your bins. The ones who are swift to demand your money but not so quick when it comes to providing those very services you are forced to pay for.

Just like that local council, which you have to pay for through council tax, the EU also costs you money – lots of money.

The UK sends a whopping £55 million a DAY to Brussels. All of that money, every penny of it, comes from YOUR taxes.

It is of course money that could be being spent on the likes of health, housing, schools and infrastructure right here in the UK, but isn’t.

Instead it’s being spent on servicing THREE EU parliament HQs – in Brussels, which is the main one; Strasbourg, to keep France happy; and Luxembourg, which does very little while still employing 2,000 people.

Shuffling back and forth between these places costs a king’s ransom and is hugely environmentally damaging, but then, the EU really is very much a “do as I say, not as I do” organisation.

Now yes, we do get some of our money back – although only about £29m out of every £55m – and what we do get back we can only spend on what the EU allows us to spend it on.

It is inconceivable to me that anyone would look upon that arrangement as a fair deal for Britain when it quite obviously isn’t.

That brings us to David Cameron and his utterly useless “renegotiation” package that is anything but what he says it is.

The Prime Minister’s new “deal” for