The peace we have enjoyed is the lasting legacy of the EU

I SOMETIMES wonder what planet Bill Carmichael inhabits; certainly his school geography lessons failed to teach him that Britain is part of Europe (The Yorkshire Post, June 27).

Here we are in an increasingly global economy, with multi-national companies, and very easy mobility across Europe, and we still have olde worlde curiosities like Bill Carmichael who want to stop the world in order to get off. How does he think Britain can have any influence on the economy, not to mention climate change, or international crime, without European unity?

But even more important is the preservation of peace. We have had the longest period of peace in Western Europe in human history. My generation is the first in a hundred years not to have had to be conscripted into military service. By 1945, France and Germany had gone to war three times in 70 years and the founders of the moves towards European unity, Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, saw that the way to avoid it ever happening again was to integrate these two countries and their neighbours. War has indeed ended within that union. It is an astonishing achievement to bring together countries that were formerly in the Soviet Union, or the Warsaw Pact and that had fascist or military dictatorships as recently as the 1970s.

Compare what happened “next door” when the federal state of Yugoslavia collapsed and the individual countries went to war. Or when the artificiality of the “nation state” is still provoking violence in Ukraine, outside the EU, and one can make the comparison with Belgium where two cultures and two languages exist peacefully side-by-side within the EU.

We need larger minds and wider vision today. Instead we are largely lumbered with timid and monolingual leaders terrified of strangers and who prefer to live in the past.

It is a shame that journalists like Bill Carmichael encourage them.

From: Terry Duncan, Greame Road, Bridlington.

SURELY Prime Minister David Cameron has done irreparable damage to the UK’s relationships with our old friends in Europe and more so the newcomers in the EU?

Does he not realise he is a minnow in a very large world at the head of a small island?

Maybe it is time that Scotland realises the quicker it severs its links with Westminster the better, and now bonds with our European partners.