The UK never left Europe – just the EU

I EXPECT I am in accord with millions in this country in wishing our gracious and caring Princess of Wales a fast and complete recovery from this dreadful disease of cancer.

Some people may regard me as an old fool but I do know nonsense when I read it and I certainly read it on Friday with Mr Craig’s letter and yesterday with Mr Frampton’s.

It seems to me that as the years go by Mr Craig seems to invent more and more ways to refer to the areas we English live in as did our ancestors, for his own narrow regionalist ambitions.

Mr Craig knows me and knows that through DNA ancestry testing, I can say with certainty that my ancestors settled in the Forest of Wychwood in what is now modernday Oxfordshire in the period 420 to 450. I would therefore have every right to claim this for the AngloSaxon peoples.

I, like 99.9% of the population however, believe myself to be English, just as King Athelstan did after the Battle of Brunanburh in 937 after years of trying to protect the Anglo-Saxon peoples from aggressors always trying to invade the kingdom.

In yesterday’s newspaper Mr

Frampton tries to convince readers that it is time to return to “the heart of Europe”. Our country never left Europe, Mr Frampton, just the EU. We left because the leave campaign won a majority in 2016 to leave.

I don’t meet many leave campaigners who regret leaving the EU, quite the opposite in fact. Many remain campaigners now and agree that it was the right decision given the questions raised by Timo Wollmershaeuser’s report for the

IFO and the IfW Kiel Institute’s report showing that Germany is still in “a winter of recession” with weak growth predicted by both for 2024.

Meanwhile, France is riven with infighting about the emergency brake being applied by their government to bring their finances back under control.

If this country was mad enough to wish to join the EU now, it would have to be as a new applicant and the first thing we would have to do is to give up sterling and join the euro currency and have no say in decision making.