THIS week we commemorate 100 years since the end of the First World War and 74 years since D-Day, when 186 French and 150,000 USA, British and Canadian troops landed in France to retake Western Europe from the Nazis.

Since 1945, the USA has been the backbone of NATO, which has kept peace in Western Europe and upon the collapse of the Soviet Union took the Eastern European countries into its protective shield.

The EU has not spent even one cent on defending Europe, despite its claims.

We leave the EU next March but remain part of NATO, that protects all of the EU, so there’s no need for an EU army which will have its HQ in Germany and which President Macron says will be mixture of all races conscripted under the EU flag to achieve – as President Juncker states – the EU’s objectives.

Will our MP and others who want us to stay in the EU be prepared to send their families to die in foreign fields for the EU as the USA sent its young men to die to protect our democracy, without which you would not be able to read this independent newspaper?

Lest we forget.

HOWARD SCAIFE Ilkley

* Keighley & Ilkley MP John Grogan responds: “I very much support Britain’s role in NATO, which has been the cornerstone of our defence and that of many of our European neighbours for decades.

“As Mr Scaife notes, our American allies came to the aid of Europe in the Second World War.

“The promise all NATO members make now is to do likewise if any member comes under attack and as a British MP I would want to honour that promise (it is perhaps worth noting that most members of NATO are also members of the EU).

“That does not mean as an independent nation we cannot from time to time take a different view to the United States.

“We were right not to join them in the war in Vietnam in the 1960s and wrong to send British forces to Iraq alongside them in 2003."