Well, Pete, I'm not easily taken in by films, but I went to see Darkest Hour last night. It fired me up enough to spend a couple of hours at home afterwards, checking up on the veracity or otherwise of the yarn. Right, some liberties were definitely taken, but... I'm no Churchill fan. My great Uncle Jimmy died uselessly, aged nineteen, at Gallipoli in 1915. His name is on a plaque, spelled wrong, in Salford Cathedral. He's somewhere on the Helles Memorial, but I'm damned if I can track that down. He has no grave. How he might have changed my life had he been around when I was a nipper. To some extent, Winston might have been responsible for his death, who knows. But Churchill was depicted as standing almost alone, politically, against Nazi tyranny, when his compatriots might have sold out the whole of occupied Europe in order to save the Empire. Not bad, I thought, for an avowed Empire man... The EEC was founded in order to promote free trade among the countries that had been perennially and damagingly at war and to ensure that war in Europe never happened again. That was achieved, eventually, not just by free trade but, eventually, by insisting that member states were democratic and abided always by the rule of law. Democracies do not go to war with each other, and so it's proved. Dunno how old you are Pete, but I was born in 1951 and have never been called up to fight in a bloody war and there's no prospect that my one-and-only beloved son will be either. That'll do me. The EU has a bloated bureaucracy and all that, as well as some bloody silly conventions apropos of agriculture and fisheries. But we can best fight these absurdities by staying in and making the argument (always remembering that the UK agrees with 95% of EU laws anyway and actively disagrees with just 2% of them), and remembering that we have considerable influence as one of the largest members. When you come to think of it, if you really want to see a democratic deficit you only have to look at the way the referendum campaign was run and how the Tories have tried to sidestep democracy ever since. It makes the EU look like a bunch of fluffy bunnies. Stay and fight!