BRIAN Dash implies that I am a liar, when he refers to my “claimed quote” from Digby Jones, former head of the CBI (Letters, April 24).

I can assure Mr Dash that I heard Lord Digby make the statement, when he was a guest speaker at the 20th anniversary National Conference of UKIP, at the Methodist Hall, Westminster, on September 20, 2013.

For the record, let me quote him again: “If Britain left the European Union tomorrow, we would have a new trade agreement within 24 hours.”

Other EU member states export more to the UK than we sell to them, and, contrary to Lib Dem hysteria, we will never “lose access to European markets”.

Doing business with the EU does NOT depend on membership of it.

On the subject of jobs, it is interesting to recall that 500 UK jobs were lost last year, when a one hundred million euro/£80m EU loan was made to Ford, to transfer their Transit factory from Southampton to Turkey (not even in the EU!).

Meanwhile, the much-vaunted “free-movement” principle seems also applicable to employment, with Twinings Tea and British American Tobacco wanting to transfer hundreds of jobs from Britain to Poland.

COLIN HINGSTON, Southampton.