This letter from our Chairman, Edward Spalton, appeared in the Derby Telegraph on 21st August 2015

I agree with correspondent MC Haines that the EU provides well-paid and lavishly pensioned second careers for politicians who have passed their sell-by date at home “EU is just a retirement club for politicians” (August 14).

Not only that – their salaries, pensions and perks are free of UK income tax but they still feel free to condemn the moral turpitude of tax avoidance by less favoured mortals!

If that was all the EU was about, it would be a nice little earner for them but relatively harmless.

Back in 1961 when the British government, under American pressure, was desperately trying to get in on the racket, the Lord Chancellor Lord Kilmuir advised what it was really about.

“It is clear … that the (European) Council of Ministers could … make regulations which would be binding on us even against our wishes, and which would, in fact, become for us part of the law of the land. For Parliament to do this would go far beyond the most extensive delegation of powers, even in wartime, that we have experienced and I do not think there is any likelihood of this being acceptable to the House of Commons … we should have therefore to accept a position where Parliament had no more power to repeal its own enactments … we could only comply with our obligations under the Treaty if Parliament abandoned its right of passing independent judgment on legislative proposals put before it.”

This advice remained a secret, kept from Parliament and people until long after Parliament was duped in 1972 by clever procedural business to vote by a narrow majority for a treaty which no MPs – apart from the ministers involved in the surrender – had ever had a chance to scrutinise. MPs signed a blank cheque for what was not their’s to give away: larger and larger surrenders of our right to democratic self-government have been made at every subsequent EU treaty. Whilst we still have the pageantry of the state opening of Parliament and all the appearances of ancient, responsible, parliamentary government, it has been hollowed out: our institutions of state, evolved over centuries, will remain a complete fraud for as long as we remain subjects of the European Union . And it has all been done over generations by ministers who had taken a solemn, binding oath to uphold the sovereignty of the Crown on behalf of the nation against all foreign powers and potentates. Edward Spalton