GET your blinkers off, Chris Davis MEP (Letters, November 30). In the early 1970s, we joined the European Economic Community. Our Commonwealth allies, Australia, New Zealand, etc, had sent us food, including meat, during two world wars.

They had stood by us on the battlefields and were then unceremoniously dumped in favour of us going into Europe.

Many of their farmers went bankrupt, just as ours are doing now, they had to start again, finding markets for their beef and lamb, while we paid higher food prices, and took on board the common agricultural policy. And what a disaster it has been for us in the UK!

Everything the EU have had a hand in has meant that Britain has lost - fishing, agriculture, the ERM.

We are held to ransom by the French when something is done which they do not like. They blockade our lorries, making our haulage businesses lose money. Heavy transport is being undercut by continental lorries because they can buy their fuel at much cheaper rates.

Animal welfare is a joke. There is much publicity given to the banning of fox hunting and closing down of fur farms, while our beef, lamb and live animals are sent abroad under appalling conditions, crowded into trucks and shipped hundreds of miles to tatty abattoirs in Europe. Slaughtering costs in Britain have escalated - many in the business have closed down - due to regulations thought up by unelected bureaucrats in the EU.

Yet live animals are suffering far more than ever they did before we joined the EU. Are we really trying to say that French and German and other EU meat has never given rise to BSE, that the animals bred in the EU are perfectly clear?

Yes, we need to trade with Europe, but we should do like the rest of Europe and only obey diktats which suit us, and which make sense.

What is the point of the silly legislation about to be thrust upon us, whereby shopkeepers will be fined for selling goods under our own present weights system? There is absolutely no need to change our system at all. This will provide yet another army of well-paid inspectors, on fat salaries, with yet more costs to add on to our small businesses.

Have you counted the number of times the TV newsreaders announced that the beef on the bone ban will be lifted "within the next few days?" Yet, weeks went on before anything was done.

More money is being spent on a roadshow to tell us how we will benefit by joining the single currency, yet our financial institutions have never done better. Even the financial journalists, who were forever singing the praises of the euro, are now having doubts because the value of the euro is steadily sinking.

After the debacle of the ERM, the less we have to do with the euro, the better.

MARY FLETCHER, Higham Hall Road, Higham.

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