I SUPPOSE it is asking a bit too much to expect anybody from UKIP to be at all honest about Europe.

Ian Upton (Bolton Evening News, June 30) is probably no worse than average.

None of them like Europe (at all), very few of them understand about Europe (at all).

Let us take one obvious example. Mr Upton quotes the European draft constitution as stating that, "The union shall adopt measures to ensure the co-ordination of economic policies of member states", and asks how this can be done without joining the Euro.

Well, ever since the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1946, and certainly since Mrs Thatcher floated the Pound on the international exchanges in the early 1980s, international economic organisations have ensured that states co-ordinate economic policies on issues like interest rates, the size of deficit a government is allowed to run, maximum levels of inflation, and so on. This would continue whether or not we join the Euro. You simply cannot run an international trading economy without some such requirement.

The other members of whatever group of countries you decide to trade with, will, (quite rightly) insist on it. And your readers may be certain that any free trade agreement which UKIP would attempt to negotiate with the rest of Europe would have a precisely similar requirement built into it.

So all of this nonsense that suggests we could pull out of the bits of Europe we don't like and negotiate on the bits we do like falls flat on its face.

There is no reason at all why the rest of the EU should negotiate a soft deal with us, other than to get rid of the argument that the UKIP practise. Pulling out would effectively mean that we would cease to influence, at all, the only possible source for social and domestic progress in the UK for the foreseeable future. It could have been done in 1975, and I argued for it then. It would be disastrous now.

Peter Johnston

Kendal Road

Bolton