The ‘in’ and ‘out’ campaigns? Claptrap on both sides!

Is there a genuinely independent go-to guide for anyone who cares about the future of the UK economy but isn’t sure how to cast their vote in the Brexit referendum? Two-thirds of voters are said by unreliable pollsters to have made up their minds already, which leaves at least a third undecided. As the strident rhetoric and tendentious factoids of the two campaigns intensify, the need for dispassionate analysis could not be greater.

So it seems a good time to take counsel from one of the City’s wisest greybeards. Rodney Leach — Lord Leach of Fairford — did as much as anyone, as a leader of Business for Sterling, to save us from the potential disaster of euro membership. Today, in addition to his day job as a director of Jardine Matheson, he’s the guiding light of the think tank Open Europe, which has been campaigning for effective reform in Brussels for the past decade.