BRIAN Dash (Letters, December 6) objects to references to the EU’s “unelected pen pushers”

but glibly passes off “shared sovereignty” as a trifling concession in return for spurious economic benefits of membership.

There is no such thing as shared sovereignty; a nation is either sovereign or not and without sovereignty there can be no democracy.

The EU was created by a post-war French political elite with the express purpose of suppressing French and European democracy, the Common Market being a mere smokescreen to dupe the gullible into supporting the “project”.

Now that the reality is plain for even the most blinkered to see, EU apologists try to intimidate the electorate with their fiction that withdrawal from the EU would cause economic disaster.

Like all despotic regimes, the EU will eventually collapse but not without doing untold damage on the way as its rulers become ever more desperate in clinging on to power.

Britain can choose to stay in and perish among the embers or get out now and start behaving like a grown-up democratic nation-state.

JOHN SHERIDAN SMITH, Southampton.