I WISH Mike Turner would stop denying that I am female, my husband and three children are very unimpressed!

Once again Lib Dem Mike preaches the joy of federalism and integration. Let us take a closer look at his ideal.

We are told by the main political parties that a federal Europe will advance the cause of world peace but does the record of all existing giant federations support this? Does such an assertion do anything to explain why the federal USA has been involved in every major war of the last 100 years? Or why federal China has aggressively occupied independent Tibet? Or why is federal Russia at war with Chechnya? Or why federal India has had military confrontations with every one of its major neighbours? Each of these giant federations is armed with nuclear weapons; considerations which surely make it imperative that we be informed on precisely what grounds it is assumed that those now already actively engaged in seeking to form a European Army can be trusted to be any more peaceful. It is also said that the surrender of our sovereignty into a giant entity is essential for our economic advancement, an assertion which does nothing to explain why millions of federal Americans live below the poverty line; why the people of federal India and China are amongst the poorest in the world nor why federal Russia continues to stagnate in an ocean of corruption. It is an argument that also appears content to ignore the fact that most of the wealthiest nations in the world have populations of less than 10million. It is quite evident that the bigger the power bloc the bigger the wars, the bigger the oceans the bigger the storms, which is why the global economic collapse of 1929 erupted not in tiny Iceland or Switzerland (two of the richest countries in the world ) but in giant federal America.

In short, the arguments for a federal Europe are bunkum and yet we are being pressurised to surrender our sovereignty to Brussels when most of us seem to have less and less influence in what currently goes on in Westminster - hence UKIP.

Val Cowell, Chairman UKIP Fylde Coast