One of over a thousand!

Dear North East 'No' Campaign
Thank you for being a competent, professional, down-to-earth campaigning team. Thank you for helping us to say 'No' to huge costs and 'Yes' to getting our current representatives - MPs, MEPs, councillors at various levels - to do the jobs that they are, after all, employed to do and which they have sworn oaths to do..... but which they then ignore in favour of party loyalty and expenses/pay-packet loyalty. That is the real problem that needs fixing that would solve all the other issues that people have been arguing about during the referendum campaign. We need to hold the current office holders to account before we start claiming that a new structure will somehow magically produce accountability from the same people - council leaders etc who would want jobs in an elected assembly - who have a track record of resisting accountability in their current and former public servant roles.

Incidentally, the official 'No' campaign wasn't half as good as your 'No' campaign. Their website just wasn't informative enough nor up-to-date enough. It came across as half-hearted and it lacked comprehensive information. Its design and navigation also wasn't as clear or accessible as yours.

If we'd failed to give a 'no' then some of the blame could be traced to the lack of an effective official 'No' campaign. But we also have to beware of being too web-based. Significant portions of society do not have computers and do not want them. Older people, for instance, have seen politicians come and go, they've seen previous spin and seen how it pans out. They've seen how 'this will give you a voice' has been used time and again and that it hasn't properly delivered 'a voice' yet. These people often do not have web access and would find it difficult to learn from the web even if they had access. These are the people, I believe, who will be instrumental in saying no to an EU constitution because they have lived long enough to not be swayed by window-dressing. They also fought for democratic rights and freedoms - suffragettes, two world wars - so they take these things less frivolously than the gung-ho younger generations who would give the EU a go just for the sake of trying it in their ignorance of the fact that it's all been tried before and it was called things like the German Empire, the British Empire, the Soviet Union.......The 'Yes' campaign was more active than all the 'No' campaigns put together in terms of sending leaflets and letters (to my house, at least), but then certain Labour MPs were in cahoots with them as well as certain sport personalities....... In any case, they weren't effective were they? Lessons learned all round.I'd like to see England united against these plans to fragment the country.

If each 'region' has a 'No' campaign that doesn't bother to join up with the 'No' campaigns of other regions then we have simply fragmented ourselves according to these regional maps from 'on high'. Obviously, that would be to hand them their victory. Unity is the immune system that maintains coherence and integrity in the face of threats of division. United we stand, divided we fall. It's as simple as that.I look forward to your campaign about the EU constitution. This country - preferably as the UK, but failing that, as England - needs to wake up in good time so that we can prevent a huge disaster in democracy that will, I believe, take about a century to correct if it's allowed to happen. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Once again, my gratitude for your teamwork and your campaigning to date.Yours sincerelyA very pleased voter!!