“Puppet Papademos is in place, and as Athens caught fire on Sunday night he rather took my breath away – he said violence and destruction have no place in a democratic country.”

Any normal and fair-minded person would have a perfect right to be concerned if a group of Romanian people suddenly moved in next door.

I know there’s an online petition to have another referendum [like Brexit] but I think honestly I think if people want to go for it a little further down the line it would be a hiding for nothing.

I think that politics needs a bit of spicing up.

We must break up the eurozone. We must set those Mediterranean countries free.

It is virtually impossible for what you are voting on to remain as it is currently. There could be huge changes to the treaty and there could be huge changes to the euro zone itself.

It’s the FSA and its plethora of EU bodies that’s failed.

Nobody in Britain has voted for 4 million people to come here in the last 15 years, and for probably another 3 million to come between now and 2020.

There are two completely different Britains. There’s London, and there’s the rest of Britain.

The great and the good will decide what is good for us and make sure that we get what is good for us, good and hard.

Minimum sales prices for alcohol are a startlingly bad idea. As with excise duties, the effects are regressive.

It’s a European Union of economic failure, of mass unemployment and of low growth.

This is taking place inside Europe. This is taking place inside a once great nation. The nation that invented democracy. We are on the edge of total social breakdown. And frankly, as far as the euro is concerned and the austerity measures are concerned, the medicine is killing the patient.

If an idea is indeed sensible, it will eventually become just part of the accepted wisdom.

When people stand up and talk about the great success that the EU has been, I’m not sure anybody saying it really believes it themselves anymore.

I admire [Alex] Salmond in many ways but my problem with him has always been this independence thing within the EU, which is rubbish.

Basically, Herman van Rompuy wants the European Union to become a debt union, which may be acceptable to some of the southern countries who are effectively bust. To the northern countries, it is not.