MR NEIMER (Your Say, Nov 29) clearly falls into the category of “didn’t pay attention at the time” to both sides of the debate about the EEC referendum in the seventies.

He also didn’t pay attention to my letter, misrepresenting my careful “portrait of honesty compared to this time round” as something more wildly unqualified.

Originally, the clause about ever-closer union received much attention. The pro-EEC lobby claimed that any future extension of our European commitments would require our agreement in a new treaty.

Technically, this was perfectly correct, and we have negotiated and signed each new treaty as it arose. Again, there was debate about the implications for those who took the trouble to follow it.

EEC opponents argued, quite sagely, that once you had joined a “club” (the metaphor was in common use) it was difficult to resist rule-changes when they were proposed and supported by others in the club. That was also obviously true.

Those who paid attention were well aware of this and voted accordingly.

I rather doubt that people are as aware as Mr Neimer thinks of the “true nature of the EU”.

If they were, they would not use such crudely ill-defined and unqualified terms as “Brussels diktat” and “undemocratic” which one reads and hears so often. It isn’t as simple as that.

And 48 per cent of us, while holding reservations, see the EU as at least holding some hope for a more unified world in which the forces of globalisation, partly antithetical to the interests of most of us, can be more easily modified than through the individual nation-state, now in our case an economically and politically greatly reduced power.

BARRY TEMPEST

Romulus Close, Dorchester