THE disease seems to be spreading. First we heard of cricket matches being fixed. Next, widespread doping in world athletics, then accusations that international tennis is rotten to the core, while, of course, bungs, bribery and skulduggery have long infested football.

This disease has now spread to the issue of the EU referendum. David Cameron is the skulking leopard who has belatedly changed his spots: for years he resisted calls for a referendum, but suddenly he is rushing to hold this vote as soon as possible, perhaps as early as June. Why has he changed?

Actually, we don’t need to employ more than a couple of brain cells to explain the prime minister’s new-found urgency. It’s immigration.

More than a million immigrants arrived in Europe last year alone and Jean Claude Juncker, unelected president of the European Commission, has just announced that even more will arrive this year. He has even worked out a scheme which will allocate precise numbers to be taken in by each member state of the EU.

Now we know Cameron is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but you can bet that some policy wonk has whispered in his ear: “Look Dave, this immigration crisis is going to get a lot worse.

And more migrants will mean more social disorder like that in Cologne and Sweden. This will turn the British public even more eurosceptic than they are already. I know you want above all to keep us in the EU, so you’d better arrange the referendum pronto, before things get much worse.”

And to this end the lies and propaganda factory is in full production. Between now and the vote we shall be alternately bribed and threatened by the pro-EU side.

The EU Commission will promise Britain £billions for new infrastructure projects and at the same time they will try to terrify us with warnings that if we vote to leave it will cost three million jobs.

Such threats are all baloney. The most prosperous countries in Europe per capita are Norway and Switzerland and they are not members of the EU. Leaving the EU will not damage our trade – just the opposite. For the EU is not a free trade area, but a customs union which imposes huge financial penalties on our trade deals with the rest of the world. Getting out will free us up to be a great trading power.

The totalitarian kleptocracy which has its HQ in Brussels would then have no more authority over us, to strangle our financial industries with extra taxes and regulations. We should no longer have to pay towards the cripplingly-extortionate common agricultural policy whose sole purpose is the subsidising of inefficient French farmers. We might even get to revive our fishing industry, previously destroyed by the EU quota system. And we shall not have to pay £13billion pa into the EU coffers.

Decades ago Edward Heath confessed that he had lied when he said that our entering the EU would lead to “no loss of national sovereignty”. The truth is that nearly all our laws are now made by the EU bureaucracy. We can take our sovereignty back, run our own affairs and particularly control our borders. But the biggest objection to the EU is neither financial nor judicial: it is moral. The EU is unaccountable: literally, they haven’t signed off their accounts for 19 years. The EU parliament is a rubber stamp for the policies and whims of the self-appointed commissioners. The whole damn show is a racket and it’s time we got out.