WE WISH to object to Molly Scott Cato calling Brexit voters xenophobes, an offensive and untrue appellation.

We have supported Ukip since its inception and as soon as we heard the results of the referendum our bunting from the Queen’s birthday celebrations went along our front fence where it stayed untouched.

This is called patriotism, love of one’s country, the reason my father enlisted, under age, in 1916, sustaining shrapnel wounds to his legs which pained him until his death in 1968.

In 1942, over age, he joined the Merchant Navy, being discharged 1946.

My elder sister and her husband were in the RAF and WAAF, my other sister’s half-French husband spent four years as a POW in Germany and developed frostbite from forced marches to the Polish salt-mines.

His circulation was poor ever after.

Yet his brother, in the RAF, met and married a German girl and brought her home to their Kentish village where they all lived happily.

One of our Brighton cousins married David who was Jewish.

Now we have welcomed my son’s Turkish partner, London born and educated, after her parents came to England and set up a tailoring business; they have given me another granddaughter, four next month.

An ongoing local history project is researching the stories of [mainly] Polish families who came to Britain after the Resettlement Act of 1947 and how they integrated with local people, this arose from some of my children’s classmates having difficult to spell and pronounce surnames, and also the death anniversaries in our church bulletins.

There are numerous Polish graves in Woodchester Priory churchyard, also in Fairford; there were five camps in Gloucestershire alone, the Catholic faith being the glue holding it together.

We have a German friend who is a teacher in Bamberg, some readers may remember her, Dorothea Mestermann, who lodged with Sheila Maddock when she taught at Rednock.

We visited her this year, staying with a friend of hers, a welcoming family home shared with lodgers of several nationalities.

Incidentally, Bamberg is a city where they look after their heritage, not a plastic window to be seen, but my abiding impression was of the brass plaques set in the paving outside the houses of those who died in the Holocaust.

So you can see that we are neither racist nor xenophobic in our family, but we do want our laws set by our parliament.

One size does not fit all.

Our weight is measured in stones and pounds, not kilogrammes, likewise our height, in feet and inches, we keep to the left on roads and escalators, are English and love our island’s heritage and traditions.

Jenny Bailey

Stroud