The Athelney Trust unaudited NAV rose by a modest 0.3% in May whereas the FTSE Small Cap and AIM All-share increased by 0.2% and 1.2% respectively but the Fledgling actually fell by the latter percentage, so not a great month for small caps. as the 23 June started to loom large in investors’ thinking. On which subject, everyone in the saloon bar seems to have a favourite complaint about EU regulation; how many bananas are allowed in a bunch or whether children may blow up balloons. All rubbish, of course. Yet even hated regulation can bring benefits and should be considered to be standardization, not regulation.

Again, the costliest burdens are home-grown such as the tight planning laws, the new living wage and the apprenticeship levy. By international standards, Britain is lightly regulated – according to the OECD, it has the least regulated labour market and the second least-regulated product market in Europe. It also comes high in the World Bank’s rankings for ease of doing business. Assuming that we turned our back on the single market (a disaster, in my opinion) and traded from outside, exporters to the EU would still have to comply with most regulations. In short, Britain would not find it easy to scrap many of its regulations and businesses may find that there are two sets of rules to follow – London and Brussels.

An important point is being lost in the increasingly bitter debate is that the European Commission’s better regulation agenda limits new regulations and results in existing ones being withdrawn. It is surely ironic that we may be about to turn our back on Europe just when the EU has come round to our way of thinking.