A ranting we will go...

WHILE I have nothing but admiration for our two UKIP Euro MPs Jeffrey Titford and Tom Wise and their staff in Chelmsford, the ravings of their ardent letter-writing supporters leave me exasperated. There is just no reasoning with them.

With missionary zeal, they take every opportunity to berate "Europe" and woe betide anyone who dares suggest that Britain's ills are the fault of decisions in Whitehall and Westminster rather than Brussels and Strasbourg.

Take one Ian Smith of Bury St Edmunds, who says I should resign as political editior -  "if I was in a position requring accurate, responsible, journalism and failed, I would feel like resigning" he wrote in a billious letter last week because of my "prejudiced, preconceived notions."

Then there's Doreen Lee of Ixworth and Ken Bennett of Rochford. In common with several UKIP writers, they proudly point to "Major Steps Towards a Europe of the Regions and Cities in an Integrated Continent" as evidence that the East of England region is an edict from Brussels. Nowhere is to be found in its pages any evidence that civil servants in the European Commission drew up our artificial regions.

James Carver of Nayland - whose anti-EU views garnered him just 2,454 votes in South Suffolk at the last General Election - asserts Brussels is out to extinguish all national pride so that the regions in all the countries of the EU can gradually be controlled by Brussels.

UKIP supporters see every policy with which they disagree as a Brussels plot to subborn Britain. They cannot be reasoned with.

The trouble with UKIP is that letter writing to newspapers has the smell of orchestration. Familiar names lisiting the same old catalogue of European ills.

It's just a pity that supporters of Europe cannot be persuaded to come out of the closet and put the counter argument.

Whatever happened to the Britain in Europe movement?