Staying in the EU will only lead to further erosion of British sovereignty

SIR – Anthony Pick (Letters, January 10) is obviously unaware of how the EU works. At present the UK has about 9 per cent of the vote across the various EU institutions. This percentage will decrease when other countries join (and there is a queue, including Turkey). In the Council of Ministers, any proposals are subject to qualified majority voting. This means that Britain can be, and frequently is, easily outvoted on any changes it would like to make to regulations, directives and treaties.

As Christopher Booker points out (Review, January 10), it is likely that there is a new treaty round the corner and it will be difficult, if not impossible, for Britain to make any radical changes to it. Instead, we could be sucked into closer political union and a further surrendering of our sovereignty.

David Samuel-Camps

Eastleigh, Hampshire SIR – So far I have seen nothing that has persuaded me that we will be better off remaining in the EU. David Cameron’s obsession with EU migrants and their benefits is pretty low down on the scale of importance.

Far more important is the question of absolute sovereignty for the British Parliament, which appears to be off the agenda.

Christopher Carver

Yeovil, Somerset SIR – The British electorate knows that the arguments for leaving the EU or staying in are finely balanced. To leave is high-risk because nobody really knows what the unintended consequences would be; to stay in is low-risk, but we would remain frustrated by the labyrinthine machinations of an undemocratic Brussels bureaucracy.

May we have some factual guidance? All the speculation of who is going to side with the Ins or the Outs, and the rumours of anger, splits, fury, mutiny, resignations and so forth, do not help us to decide how we will vote.

Richard Howe

London SW1 SIR – The claim that the EU is the source of peace within Europe, repeated yet again on last Thursday’s

Question Time, cannot go unchallenged.

Nato includes non-EU states, such as the United States and Turkey. It was founded in 1949, well before the Treaty of Rome, and continues to guarantee the peace of Europe even after the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact. Meanwhile, Germany has transformed itself from a warmongering state into a model democracy determined to atone for the horrors of the Third Reich.

These are welcome developments, but only myth-makers can claim that they were generated by the EU.

Prof David Abulafia

University of Cambridge

Dr Irina Somerton

University of London

Prof John Charmley

University of East Anglia

Dr Robert Crowcroft University of Edinburgh and 10 others; see telegraph.co.uk