It will give me great pleasure in this debate to highlight the contradictions, the half-truths, the misrepresentations that UKIP has constantly told about the EU and that are contained in this resolution. 

Let me start by looking at the fear that UKIP expressed about an ever-closer union in their resolution. Now, I think it's worth reminding ourselves that the European Union was forged following the disaster of the second world war, and a close union is in fact a commitment to peaceful co-existence, co-operation and co-determination. A bit more of that is what we should be looking for in our society at the moment. And the EU has been fantastically successful at constructing a Europe that is characterised by peaceful, if sometimes argumentative, co-operation rather than war and destruction. And it's no coincidence that the EU became a beacon of hope for the countries of central and eastern Europe, who suffered for so long under Russian dictators. And their principal aspiration after the fall of the Berlin wall was to join the organisation.

And can I also point out that far from being some sort of continental conspiracy foisted upon an unwilling and proud Britannia, the initiative for creating the organisation that grew to become the European Union drew inspiration from our own wartime leader, Winston Churchill? Churchill is regarded as one of the 11 founding fathers of the European Union. He, of course, was the founder of the United Europe Movement, and in 1946 he said,

'We must build a kind of United States of Europe…The structure of the United States of Europe, if well and truly built, will be such as to make the material strength of a single state less important…If at first all the States of Europe are not willing or able to join the Union, we must nevertheless proceed to assemble and combine those who will and those who can.'