Many of us are opposed to joining the European Union, giving infringement of independence as top reason.

Next to nothing is mentioned about war and peace. Yet we weren't far off losing our independence in the last war.

In the past 100 years, Britain and others spent ten years in full scale European wars, which took the whole of our resources and the lives of hundreds of thousands of our men.

The last war took 50 million European lives and the Russians say 95 per cent of their young men aged 17-21 were slaughtered.

If footballers were allowed to play independently as they wished, with no referee, the result would be stagnation and carnage.

That's how I see Europe. In 2003 we say wars are a thing of the past, like the gambler who puts his shirt on the horse that he knows cannot lose. But the history is different.

Over the past 3,000 years I doubt whether there has been a single day without battles or wars somewhere in Europe.

I would vote to join a democratic, unified Europe where an endless supply of insignificant little dictators cannot grow into an endless supply of insane monsters and where the days of ice cream on the beaches would make the days of young men on the beaches with guns, grenades and stretchers, obsolete.

-VJ Harman, Hove