SIR,

One could not escape the news this week that David Cameron gave an important speech about the EU and our future in it.

Return me to number 10 next time, he said, and I will grab some powers back from the EU and give you an in/ out vote on the new settlement and bury the matter once and for all.

It all sounds lovely but then again the art of selling refrigerators to eskimos is a key skill for any modern politician.

What has been offered, once the double-speak has been stripped down to plain talking, is not very much at all; In the unlikely event of a Conservative victory at the next general election Cameron promises to negotiate with the EU to get some powers back.

Exactly what powers are still unclear, although he muttered something about fishing and the working time directive.

Assuming every political commentator in the nation and on the continent is wrong and he does manage to wrestle a few concessions from the soviet in Brussels he will then come back home, trumpet his gains as some sort of victory and campaign to keep us in the EU.

Not only that but Labour and the LibDems will also campaign to keep us in, thus providing the British people with a mainstream consensus and a lop sided debate.

One would hope that should he fail to gain his concessions he would have the good grace to break the consensus and campaign to take us out, but as he bent over backwards to avoid answering that question I won't be betting on it.

Let's be honest. This whole pantomime was nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with uniting the ranks of the Tory party and coaxing voters back from UKIP.

"The UKIP fox has been shot," crowed the Tory press the day after, but I am willing to predict the shot went wide. Why?

Well, for one thing people who bother to think about it will quickly see the sophistry deployed against them.

Cameron wants to keep us in the EU. The EU will be unchanged. We will still have to obey laws faxed over to us from a foreign capital by people we have no power to dismiss in an election.

Any powers Cameron claws back will make little impression on this vast tide of red tape and interference from across the water.

We will still run a trade deficit with the EU and pay £50 million a day for the privilege (that's the annual wages of 250 new policemen, 50 hospital consultants or one new school – every 24 hours – austerity? Not in Brussels). The dash for a federal superstate will continue and democracy will wither.

For me, powers coming back to these shores is no victory. It is simply the return of stolen property. No politician has or had the right to hand over the governance of this country to a third party for the purposes of trade or co-operation or anything else.

Freedom is precious and must be defended by everyone of us at all times – we cannot leave it to others or allow it to slip through our fingers through apathy.

When my mother was born Britain governed a quarter of the worlds population. In the latter half of her life we have incubated a generation of politicians whose main aim, it seems to me, is to convince the British people they cannot even govern themselves.

These voices must be ignored. Britain, freed from EU red tape and given licence to pursue its own trade deals with the world, could be a global player once more.

And for those people who want to run us down and fear being a sovereign nation as we once were I can only quote Thomas Jefferson: "Those who wish to trade freedom for security won't have to, for they will surely lose both."

A lesson the Greeks and Spanish are learning to their cost.

The fox runs yet. I for one wish it godspeed.

Gareth Dunn

(Monmouth)