I think it is about time to kill the myth so beloved of remainers that the European Union has brought peace to Europe for the last 70 years.

That peace owes its existence, and indeed its continuance, not to the EU but to the creation of Nato and the threat of communist Russia and now Putin’s Russia. This external menace far outweighed and outweighs now any internal European differences.

Nato, formed largely due to the work of Atlee and Bevin, committed the USA to protect Europe from external threats and by its creation bound the free states of the continent in alliance. It was formed in 1948 – treaty formally signed in 1949 – in response to the communist coup in Czecho­slovakia and the Russian blockade of West Berlin.

It thus antedates the formation of the European Economic Community which was conceived solely as an economic alliance without any mutual defence strings attached and greatly antedates the formation of the EU post-Maastricht.

One other myth deployed in Ms Denbigh’s letter of last week is that all the environmental improvements of the last few decades are down to the EU. Many of those initiatives originated in the UK and would have been brought in quicker had we not been a part of the EU but because of its stultifying bureaucracy we have to get 27 others to pretend to agree even if they don’t implement in practice

Sorry Ms Denbigh, its the EU that is a disaster, Brexit is our salvation.

John Sprague

Knowle Road, Salcombe