When Watford MP Richard Harrington says he prefers the PM’s ‘Treaty’ (Watford Observer, March 29), crafted by the architects of the EU superstate, to Brexiting under World Trade Organisation rules, he reveals an attitude that is alien to the history and culture of this country.

The UK has existed far longer than most of its continental neighbours. Political upheavals on the Continent have had hardly any resonance in Britain. The Second World War reinforced these divergences. The Continent had to begin again with new constitutions. Britain did not. After the war, the sense of being a European was a state of mind born of defeat and occupation, the need to build a gulf between those who collaborated and those who resisted. It is the notion of Parliamentary sovereignty which makes it so difficult for Britain to subordinate herself to a superior legal order such as that of the EU.

Referendums are the UK’s method of deciding basic constitutional questions. They are not like focus groups. When MPs legislate for a Referendum, they explicitly pass powers, given to them temporarily, back into the hands of the people. Many of the current crop of MPs did not like what the people decided - so they simply betrayed their constitutional promise. For the first time, on any important matter in almost a hundred years of universal suffrage, MPs have no moral right to do what they are doing. They are like doctors breaking the Hippocratic Oath.

As Anthony Eden said in 1952, “If you drive a nation to adopt procedures which run counter to its instincts, you weaken and may destroy the motive force of its action.” The suggestion that the United Kingdom should join a federation on the continent of Europe, and lose the ability to dismiss its elected representatives, is something that British people know in their bones they cannot do.

Prof. Christine Wheeler McNulty

Oxhey