Do we know enough to vote on Brexit?

WHEN asked about the EU referendum, most people say ‘we need more facts’. But the ‘facts’ we’re bombarded with from both sides are largely speculative spin with dodgy statistics. The facts most people really lack are what the EU does and doesn’t do. Figures quoted for the proportion of our laws ‘made in Brussels’ vary from 13 to 60 per cent. But, in fact, most areas involving state spending — including welfare, the NHS, education, pensions and law and order — aren’t touched by the EU. A lot of what the EU does do — consumer and environmental protection — is widely regarded as beneficial. As for the ‘democratic deficit’, a detailed review by Princeton University in the United States concluded this is a myth and that ‘the EU is at least as democratic, and generally more so, than its member states’.

FRANCIS KIRKHAM, Crediton, Devon.

Over the years, the EU has evolved into a ludicrously bureaucratic and undemocratic organisation while successive UK governments have used it as an excuse for avoiding making difficult decisions by hiding behind EU rules and regulations. life before the eec and the EU wasn’t a bed of roses, but the Government is using taxpayers’ money to generate one dubious report after another to try to scare people into believing we’ll be worse off if we leave. If the Treasury can now predict what will happen to our finances by 2030, why didn’t it predict the banking crisis of 2008?

JOHN KEAR, Cheltenham, Glos.

SOMEONE should explain to Barack Obama, President of the Land of the Free, that freedom comes through democracy, which is government through elected representatives — something that doesn’t exist in the European Union. We in the UK are pushed about by a bunch of people we haven’t ever heard of, never mind voted for.

N. WOODS, Chilton, Co Durham.