AHEAD of next week's EU referendum a series of Worcestershire figures have penned pieces for the Worcester News on why Britain should back Remain or Leave.

Here, former university lecturer, accountant, company director and Malvern councillor Anthony Warburton backs Leave.

By Anthony Warburton

"THIS referendum hinges not on why we should leave the EU - but why ever should we stay in it.

Most seem to think that our relationship is about trade and, certainly, the only coherent but hardly believable arguments against leaving are based upon the alleged trade advantages we enjoy.

We were told more than 40 years ago that we were joining a purely trading relationship. That was completely untrue.

Our politicians misled us just as they were fooled by the alleged benefits of the 'Common Market', the only real point of which was to enmesh its members in reliance upon each other as a tool of political integration.

The EU is not about free-trade, it has only ever been a protectionist customs union with a hidden agenda, restricting imports into itself from outside.

Britain aside, the EU is stagnant, economically, with low or no growth and massive problems and this is expected to continue into the indefinite future.

It is as plain as a pikestaff that a suitable agreement would be negotiated if Britain, the world’s fifth largest economy, leaves the EU.

Our markets are just too valuable to important countries like Germany and France. We would be free to agree deals with growing markets, elsewhere, without having to accommodate the demands of 27 other states.

Just look at how dismal the EU’s record of international free-trade negotiation has been.

After half a century it still does not have one single free-trade deal in place with a top 10 economy outside its own membership. Not one.

Exports to the EU contribute about only 10 per cent of our gross domestic product yet its regulations begin to dominate our way of life.

In order to frighten us into voting to remain, the Government has produced a non-stop stream of distorted and exaggerated propaganda of which Josef Goebbels would have been proud. None of it stands up to any examination.

The EU was designed, unashamedly, to make sure that government could never again be controlled by the people.

It has never before been suggested that our security is, somehow, dependent upon being members of this political union.

All this noise about trade is being made only to obscure the fact that the sole point and purpose of the EU is to impose a supra-national government on its members such that their powers of self-government are eliminated.

It's well on the way to its ambition of a slow motion coup d'etat, a takeover of our governing institutions.

Still current is the proposal to convert Britain into 12 EU provincial regions, completely bypassing Parliament, which would lose any significance. Our country would simply cease to exist.

I won’t accept that. I want to be able, with my fellow Britons, to sack a government and replace it with another.

The EU is anti-democratic, with its unelected, irremovable commissioners and its rubber-stamping fig leaf parliament.

Anyone who believes that we can avoid being drawn into 'ever closer union' is deluded.

The question for each of us is, therefore, this: am I content to see my country reduced to a group of provinces of a one party, socialist, super-state over which I have absolutely no influence. Yes or No?

I’m not and that, and my concern for the freedom and wellbeing of my child and grandchildren, is why I shall vote Leave.

I urge each of you to ask yourself the same question before you mark that ballot paper."

* Why Britain's place in the world is 'in the EU': by Harriett Baldwin and Jacqui Smith