OUTGOING Hampshire Euro MP Ashely Mote has fired a parting shot to the EU describing it as the “old Soviet Union dressed in western clothes”.

The independent eurosceptic MEP, who is not seeking re-election, spoke out ahead of the European elections next month.

Mr Mote, from Alton, who was controversially allowed to kept his seat after he was jailed for benefit fraud, told the last session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg: "Over the last five years I have watched in horror the EU’s endless, scandalous, institutionalised looting of taxpayers’ money.

"I have watched in horror an already overcrowded UK deluged by hundreds of thousands of uninvited foreign workers who arrived for their benefit and to claim our welfare.

"I have watched in close-up a legislative system which permits anonymous bureaucrats to generate so-called law without any regard for the damage they do to the British economy and businesses.

"I have watched in close-up this expensive, ineffectual talking shop of a parliament masquerading as an elaborate illusion of accountable democracy – a monstrous deceit on the electors who sent us here.”

He added: “Gorbachev was right. The EU is the old Soviet Union dressed in western clothes.

"One day you will realise you cannot be masters in someone else's house."

Mr Mote, 73, was elected to the parliament in 2004 as a member of UK Independence Party. He was kicked out of the party over a fraud trial in which he was convicted and jailed in 2007 for falsely claiming £67,000 in income support, housing benefit and council tax relief.

He was released after just two months of his nine-month sentence, allowing him to keep his European Parliament role, which earned him more than £60,000-a-year.

Mr Mote said he would now focus on clearing his name.

“Knowing so many people accept that I was the target of a political hatchet job is a priceless asset. But it is not quite enough,” he said.

"I now need the law to recognise it and throw out the confused verdicts. My appeal is already under way, and my new legal team is still developing additional ammunition."