Attended the regular quarterly of the East Midlands Regional Assembly at Melton Mowbray. Am horrified to hear the report by Regional Health Authority - who tell us that our region is the most obese not just in the whole of the UK but the most obese region in the whole of Europe!

When I get my five minutes to speak to the assembled councillors, I ask them to start giving me opinions or lobbying advice about forthcoming EU laws which are under consideration in the parliament. But I receive the usual Westminster-type “ya-boo” response. A Labour councillor making the asinine comment that “you should sort yourself out”, and a Tory councillor saying that he found Helmer satisfactory (even though Helmer has been expelled from his political group in the European Parliament), and then proving to me that he did not know about the EU Postal Directive (which liberalises distribution of letters from 2001 within the EU but has nothing to do with the UK Labour government closing rural post offices which the Tory insisted it did).

I sometimes despair at the inward-looking confrontational attitudes of Westminster which the Tory and Labour councillors copy. We all now live in a globalising world, and need to work together to match the growing might of China and India, rather than continue shouting “ya-boo” at each other in the goldfish bowl that Britain is in danger of becoming.