WE LEARNED on TV today that an EU immigrant working in this country, with two children living elsewhere, could receive about £700 per month in family tax credits. Presumably this is if he is unfortunate enough to be earning only the statutory minimum wage. Mr Cameron has pledged to get this entitlement rescinded before he puts the in/out EU referendum to the electorate.

I saw some of these workers on a sugar beet farm up near Denver Sluice in Norfolk a couple of years ago. The weather was atrocious with a cold sleety rain coming in horizontally off the North Sea. I felt the poor devils deserved every penny they earned and probably a lot more! The multi-millionaire Cabinet Minister Ian Duncan Smith has vast land holdings in that area and receives over £1 million per annum in sugar subsidy under the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Are his workers so poorly paid that they qualify for tax credits I wonder?

Is Mr Cameron going to get the CAP subsidies stopped too? After all, the recipients of these. handouts are also “benefits scroungers” and the costs are just as much a burden on the UK taxpayers. We have to “chip in” to start with in order for the funds to be available for re-distribution. It’s not even as though we need all the sugar that’s produced. Britain has an obesity problem in part due to the excessive consumption of sugar directly and through its presence in processed foods.

DONALD REEVE Old Town Swindon