IT is sad to see our MP Kit Malthouse apparently looking forward to the break-up of the EU (Advertiser, February 3).

He is too young to have known a time when this country was ravaged by war.

It was truly terrifying when the town where I was living as a kid was bombed, and traumatic to then be evacuated to a muddy West Country poultry farm and later to see relatives go off to fight and never return.

The EU is a concept to bring European nations together and to bind them into political and economic structures that make war between them unthinkable.

So part of the penalty, as Mr Malthouse would see it,is that each of the other EU countries has a say in some of our laws via regulations passed by the European Parliament.

But conversely, we also have a say in what happens in each of the other 27 EU nations.

So there are swings and roundabouts to this sovereignty issue, although we are now on the way to losing the right to work, live and travel in 27 other countries.

The idea that the EU should dissolve into a set of nations all pursuing the narrow nationalistic agenda espoused by Mr Malthouse seems a sure recipe for Europe to return to the pre-EU condition, which had lasted for 1,000 years, of one or more wars in Europe every 20 or 30 years.

It would be fanciful to think that a modern war would not affect us, wherever it took place in western Europe.

The anti-EU mood now prevailing in the Tory party seems blind to the huge costs of Brexit, such as paying for tens of thousands of civil servants to work on new agreements and procedures, in cutting the UK off from its largest export market, in diminishing income from lucrative financial services and in the flight of skilled people and jobs out of the country.

So who is going to pay?

Not the large companies who are likely to be offered tax breaks to stay here, nor the owners of the strident pro-Brexit press and not the rich donors to the Tory party.

The people who will pay are the poor and the old, via higher prices, cut services and reduced benefits. For them the outlook looks bleak.

Robert Miller, Duck Street, Abbotts Ann.