‘Leaving the EU will increase both funding and jobs for young people'

To a young person setting up home today, it appears incredible that when I was doing the same back in the 1980s, I had no choice but to pay the government for my electricity supply, gas, water, air tickets and telephone – often having to go on a long waiting list just to get connected. The large centralised structure that was government had a say, and a controlling one, in so many aspects of our lives.

The successor to that central controlling structure today is the European Union (EU).

A third of the EU budget is taken up with regional aid and a cohesion fund to help poorer areas – only a small fraction of which benefits the UK. If this is such an important and effective part of the EU, why is youth unemployment in Greece 52 per cent, Spain 46 per cent and Italy 37 per cent? Indeed, a direct result of the constraints of the Euro imposed on some of the weaker Eurozone economies has been to undermine the life chances of young people. In Greece for example, a fifth of pupils are educated in schools short of heating and lighting, while no school has been built or renovated since 2006.