CAMPAIGNERS have been attempting to persuade business leaders in Glasgow how they should vote in the EU referendum.

The Leave campaign said the EU had shifted dramatically from its original intention as a trading organisation to a bureaucratic superstate building project.

The remain campaign said economic benefits and security would be lost if Britain voted to leave.

Glasgow Chamber of Commerce hosted the event which heard from Stronger In, Chief Executive, John Edward and Business for Britain, Chairman in Scotland, Alastair McMillan.

Mr McMillan said the EU had moved from being a trading organisation to a political project to create a single state as envisaged by the founders in the 1950s.

He said a vote to leave would still allow trade with the EU make trading with others outside the EU easier and enable immigration to be controlled

Mr McMillan, who runs a hydraulic equipment firm, said: “We would be free to co-operate with any other country without having to go via EU institutions.

He said the Euro was a vanity project which had “dented” and “wrecked” economy in Portugal and Greece.

Mr McMillan said youth unemployment in Portugal was 31%, in Spain and Italy even higher at 40% and in Greece 50%.

He said: “That’s an indictment of a system that was brought in, a vanity project in the shape of the Euro.”

He added: “The EU doesn’t care about people they are just pawns in the pursuit of ever closer union.

“We have the opportunity to say ‘stop’. Throw back the gears of the EU into reverse. The EU has to be made to listen to the people.”

He added: “We welcome co-operation with our neighbours but we don’t necessarily want to be run by them.”

Mr Edward refuted the claims of the leave campaign and said that the any ideas of a European state were “dead” once EU expansion started taking in central and eastern European countries.

He rejected the claims that that unelected EU Commissioners passed laws without member states’ consent and said the EU redistributes wealth from the rich parts to the poorer parts of Europe.

Mr Edward, a former head of the European Parliament office in Scotland, said the EU was not a bureaucracy handing out laws without consent of member states.

HE said: “I’m not fanatical about the EU. I don’t think there’s no problems but they are our problems. They are our treaties we have signed and our laws.”

The audience of businessmen and women for the city were told that Glasgow had itself benefited from EU cash.

He said: “Britain was the sick man and the dirty man of Europe in the 1960s. A lot of the structural funds came to places like Glasgow because that was where it was needed most.

“I’m proud there’s a cost of being in the EUI see what the EU budget does. It redistribute from the richest to the poorest of Europe.”