I JUST do not understand why we are sidelining ourselves from the EU decision-making system.

Surely our PM’s reactions – that veto – has all the hallmarks of the reactions of a petulant child that because it can’t get its own way and says “I won’t play your game anymore, you’re not my friend!”

Let’s look at what we are turning our backs on. Did you know that just over half the UK’s trade, a whopping £200billion a year, is with the other EU states and of that over 80% is to or through the 17 state Euro block, that more than half of the foreign “direct investments” into the UK come through the other EU member states and that amounts to £351billion a year that EU membership gave us (last trading year). And you want to walk away from all that and all the profits, jobs and other benefits it represents?

Then there was that statement, we are protecting ‘The City’. Tell me were they, the same financers and the bankers, the ones, that to my recollection anyway, caused the last two financial crises, and you want us to protect them?

Again, surely a right-thinking person wanting to engineer change does it from inside the group not shouting insults over the fence. And then when it comes to national pride do we put our country first, no we put us, the individual first. Remember what President Kennedy said: “…ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”.

I really despair of the general lack of understanding, pure selfishness and short term memories, I really despair.

One last thing, if nothing else, since the formation of the EU (and its predecessors in name) we have, since 1945, had the longest period of peace among the central European states since the Romans left in AD410.

Anthony Mealing, Totteridge Road, High Wycombe