i suppose it depends on how you've looked on membership of the EU.

i didn't vote to enter the common market in 1974. i saw it then, as now, an American inspired idea to put a power bloc between it and Russia.

times moved on and Russia isn't quite the white hot threat that it appeared in the post war years.America has stopped doling out money - apart from defence installations - and there aren't as many as them.

I remember Alex Campbell playing out our folk club in 1978 - the year of Ally's army going to Argentina. He was telling us all about Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and how all the work would now go to Hamburg, thanks to the fine Italian hand of the Heath government a few years earlier.

Since then we've seen so many other industries go that way.

Now will come the abuse. Jim will call me a little Englander. Keith will call me a troglodyte trade union supporter - never let us forget Red Robbo. Dave will say that that the mprris marina wasn't up to much - forgetting that the the beetle had no legroom at the back, the renault dauphin and the renault 4 and every citroen known to man were rust buckets and the skoda estelle was prone to falling in half.

but at the bottom of my feeling is sadness for what losing our manufacturing base did to English society. THe fractured families and communities; the beggars in the street; the loss of working class culture.

just as Thatcher used the EU as an engine for monetarist reforms, whilst hating the institution for the decencies it extracted. I find the right wing of the tory party very uncongenial bedfellows.

Still I want out of the EU and they do. I'll do anything except vote for them.