CLLR Cooper (Letters, July 6) refers to our “proud, talented and resourceful nation”.

Over the next ten years, the smart money is on all the following groups leaving the ‘nation.’

1 Scotland

2 Northern Ireland

3 All corporate businesses who need to be in the EU

4 Small businesses who need, or would prefer, to be in the EU

5 Many individuals, particularly younger people, who see free movement within Europe as rather more enticing than staying, (in many cases, whose employers will be now out of this country anyway), and the wealth creators who can be more successful on a larger playing field.

London, which contributes 30 per cent of all the current UK’s tax income, will see a massive exodus of businesses and money, resulting in a huge drop in income for the country.

Perhaps Cllr Cooper can describe the sort of business that will be attracted to the UK when there will be two English-speaking EU member states down the road, both desperate to attract inward investment.

What will be left is an emaciated and emasculated England and Wales, from which much of the talent and resourcefulness will have departed.

The government will be impoverished, which means the old, the young, the disadvantaged, the poor and the ill can kiss goodbye to any ‘free at the point of delivery’ services as, of course, it will remain essential that the Government retains all its spending on its programme of weapons of mass destruction.

Perhaps the councillor, in referring to our “proud, talented and resourceful nation”, should mug up on the Bible: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18).

Jeremy Marchant

Stroud