OF ALL the issues which next week’s Referendum brings into focus, the one that attracts the most controversy and is the hardest to discuss objectively is immigration.

I think politicians are generally too reluctant to talk about what is, at the very least, a major policy area in the running of the country. I was born in Australia and much has been made of their points-based immigration system.

Above all we need to move beyond the idea that your view on immigration indicates how cosmopolitan or otherwise you may be so that we can actually look at serious issues around population size, infrastructure and resources.

Neither side of the EU debate is advocating an extreme view on immigration.

Leaving the EU would not mean an end to all immigration.

It is almost universally acknowledged that some immigration has had a beneficial impact on our economy, filled certain skills gaps and provided a significant workforce for our public services including the NHS.

It is also important to British citizens living abroad that we maintain a sensible policy on that and that it is reciprocated by other countries.

However there is no doubt that immigration is higher in the EU than it would otherwise be.

Whereas the government has taken measures to reduce immigration from the rest of the world it has been powerless to do so from within the EU and this raises two serious problems.

Firstly, there are genuine problems in dealing with the kind of numbers of immigrants that are predicted to arrive in the UK; and secondly we should not be so powerless to control something as important as our own borders.

Net migration to the UK rose to 333,000 in 2015, half of which is from the EU.

No real plans were ever made to take this sustained rise in population with its draw on housing, GPs, welfare and jobs.

The government’s own target was to reduce immigration to “tens of thousands” but the truth is that in the EU it will not be able to.

Whether you favour high or low immigration, surely no-one honestly thinks the decision is best made in Brussels.