SIR - John Cole's understanding of the peace keeping role of the EU is risible to say the least. He does say “between 1870 and 1945 Germany and France were at each other’s throats and the last two occasions resulted in a world wide conflict.”

Firstly, we were not in an EU club and we didn’t start the wars, we finished them. Secondly, it is the bungling EU that has threatened to cause more wars. Thirdly, it is NATO that has maintained peace on the continent.

The EU was complicit in two wars on the continent in the former Yugoslavia and the Ukraine. The EU’s meddling in the former failed state of the Soviet Union caused the split of the Ukraine into two and threaten a war with Putin’s Russia which may well erupt into open conflict. Although I believe Russia could not maintain a conventional war the alternative is unthinkable.

EU diplomacy helped speed former Yugoslavia into a brutal ethnic civil war. Peace was finally imposed on those troubled lands not by the EU, but by Nato and arm twisting backed by the Atlantic alliance's military muscle.

D Hodgson, Falcon Road, Bingley