POLITICIANS must understand that the rise of UKIP is not just about immigration - it is also about loss of our democracy to unelected European bureaucrats and the gross waste, incompetence and corruption endemic in the EU, which still cannot sign off the accounts after 19 years.

Then there’s the European-driven HS2: half-a-million homes, half-a-million families, more than a million people and thousands of businesses and farms will be blighted by this project.

They will not have any hope of proper compensation because of a Government so out of touch that it failed to see it had been left with a cuckoo-like vanity policy on its own doorstep - by a mischief-making outgoing administration.

Voting UKIP is the only way to influence the self-regarding and condescending arrogance the three-party political consensus displays for the people they claim to serve.

C Henson, Ullswater, York.