IN reply to Chris Martin/Colin Hingston (Daily Echo letters, June 13), the reason my article is not the UKIP they recognise is because they haven’t assimilated the extreme right wing tendencies of it.

They ask if UKIP is so right wing, why are Tories deserting their own party to join UKIP?

Which overlooks the point I made, that it is because it is so right wing, and those able to donate £5m to any party are most likely to do so with expectations of an eventual better return on their investment with UKIP than they get from their association with the Tories.

Indeed in the recent council elections, some defectors made it quite plain that their reason was due to Tory policy not being truly Conservative enough, and they deplored the dead weight of Liberal Party influence on the coalition Government. Not that that, in my view, has been much of a moderating influence on Tory intentions.

Equally anyone who thinks that the three million jobs that depend on exports to Europe will not be affected by our leaving the EU must be a supreme optimist, especially as many of those jobs are with foreign firms, based in the UK; firms that have declared they will have to review their presence here if we leave the EU.

The claim made that leaving the EU will allow us to trade more easily worldwide is spurious.

Membership of the EU does not prevent us from trading elsewhere, and firms are straining every sinew to do that. Leaving the EU will not create one extra job outside of the EU, but may lose many jobs within it, in my view not a sensible gamble.

MR D R SMITH, Southampton.