SURVEYS of the opinions of businesses, as compared with those of the views of voters, naturally have a longer lead time in the gathering and collating of the data. So it is with the new report of the Federation of Small Businesses. (“Scots firms keener on EU”, The Herald, September 17). The data were collected between mid-June and mid-July, before the current eruption of the migrant issue. The much more recent survey of popular opinion reveals English and Scots in a harmony of view (51 per cent and 49 per cent), and moving in favour of leaving the European Union.

Owing to the migrant crisis, the EU in its present form is now entering the endgame. And, as usual, when faced with a crisis, the commission presses ahead towards political union via mission creep: it seeks to arrogate to itself more powers. Last week, the President of the Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, with the support of Klaus Regling, head of the European Stability Mechanism and Bernard Coeurer, France's executive board member on the European Central Bank, proposed a separate Eurozone members chamber of the European Parliament to supervise the new treasury and the resulting fiscal and monetary union: a political union in effect.

Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, has offered to take 500,000 Middle East migrants a year. Germany has a low birth rate and, without an influx of people, a declining population. It needs more people to work and pay taxes to fund its welfare state and to share the burden of a redistributive political and fiscal union in the EU.

So, inevitably, Mr Juncker is demanding an EU migration policy in order to further political union. Modelled on the American green card work permit, this will encourage even more people to flee the Middle East. Combined with compulsory national quotas of migrants, backed up by fines on Schengen states that do not comply (the “Visegrad Four”--Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary), the work permits would regulate movement of labour from outside and between states. In time they would guarantee full EU citizenship and an EU passport. Against the latter, as things currently stand, the UK would have no barriers.

The Eurozone's drive to political union is driving a popular trepidation about the impact of this great surge of immigration and the consequences of having to deal with more Muslim fundamentalism in our midst. Multiculturalism is a failed leftist notion. UK society is founded on secular liberalism, not on religious law and conformity. And, unlike Germany, the UK does not have a problem of native zero population growth.

In these changing circumstances brought about by the migrant crisis, there is little chance of an acceptable renegotiation of our EU membership: the Eurozone states will not agree to any further impediment to political, monetary and fiscal union. We are on our way out, probably to be joined by Denmark and the Visegrad Four in a resurrected European Free Trade Area with national currencies. This would be a boon for small business.

Richard Mowbray,

14 Ancaster Drive, Glasgow.