I WAS pleased to read in your pages in this week’s edition of James Gray MP’s rejection of the PM’s use of the phrase ‘terrorist sympathiser’ when he was referring to Jeremy Corbyn in a 1922 committee meeting. That for now is where our agreement ends.

For example, I and many others from both the right and the Liberal, Green, left are worried by the anti-EU rhetoric of our MP.

The danger that faces the UK should we find ourselves ‘sleep walking’ out of Europe, as Ed Milliband once put it, is very real. The likely break-up of Great Britain that would follow as James Gray’s native country Scotland votes to leave, and the economic collapse that will result as industries such as Airbus, Honda and BMW relocate to mainland Europe, I find deeply troubling. How agriculture in the rump little England that will remain will fare without European farm payments is also in doubt.

The irony is that the current situation with the UK outside the Euro, but inside the EU, is probably as good as we can get. If Cameron had been half the statesman he imagines he is, he would have taken on the faults of Europe, like the waste of the strange dance between Brussels and Strasbourg and sought to solve these together with other EU leaders, than just act like a petulant child throwing his toys out of the pram.

An early summer date for the EU referendum now seems likely. I hope, for the sake of our country and all of us, that we will have collectively woken from our slumber by then and make the right choice to stay in. Otherwise I’m afraid “We’re all doomed Captain Mainwaring, doomed”.

DR BRIAN MATHEW, Liberal Democrat, Parliamentary spokesman for the Liberal Democrats in North Wiltshire