UKIP members were out in force last Friday as they made an impassioned plea to the party faithful to vote for Brexit. 

Chairman of UKIP Berkshire, Lea Trainer, who was in the running to be the next Thames Valley Police and Crime Commissioner, Slough borough councillor Diana Coad and deputy chair of the party, Diane James MEP, addressed the masses at a public meeting at the Hilton Hotel last Friday, to discuss the key issues surrounding the impending EU referendum on June 23.

Mr Trainer said: "This is the most critical national conversation we will have in a generation and the same determination and courage as our forefathers will be needed if we are to win our freedom. 

"The questions we need to ask ourselves are, is there anything that the EU decides for us that we cannot decide ourselves, will the remaining EU nations trade freely with us or will they start a trade war? Should Britain be a free, independent, sovereign nation once more and are the British people good enough to decide their own future and write their own laws?" 

Diane James, the party's justice and home affairs spokeswoman and one of its four European members of parliament, said: "I can tell you categorically that in two years I can give you example after example of inefficiency and government negligence and I don't believe that this country should be party of such an organisation."

She cited a lack of transparency around decision-making in Brussels and Strasbourg, the EU's economic model as based on a continent with the 'second worst economic record next to Antarctica' and that in his pledge to tackle migration, David Cameron has 'penalised Commonwealth' citizens, leaving EU residents with 'unrestricted access' in moving to the UK, as fundamental reasons for voters to back the UK's departure from the EU. 

She also refuted claims made by the Vote Leave campaign that membership of the EU costs the UK £350 million a week by stating that the actual cost of being a member nation equates to around £20 billion per year and that if the Government's Treasury were to have '£25 billion back in its coffers, then the £8 billion chief executive of the NHS' Simon Stevens has asked for (to improve the service) is there'.

Speaking to the News after the meeting, she said: "It is all about control, that is the critical issue. The point I would make is that ultimately it is the Government and their manifesto via the Treasury that decides where money is spent in the UK but the issue is that we are sending vast amounts, billions, into Europe, but retaining that money and deciding where we allocate the money to, that is the critical advantage (that leaving the EU would bring) and that would apply to Bracknell, wherever you are.

"If we can't control we can never match supply and the issues with housing, school places and the NHS will continue and continue." 

Diana Coad, a longstanding Eurosceptic, said: "I am apparently immoral, I'm a fruitcake, I'm a swivelled-eyed loon, a little Englander, all because I believe England that should govern itself, write its own laws, determine its own taxes and be able to control its own borders."