Your correspondent Niall Simpson (Letters, October 13) believes that the EU is hell bent on imposing an Orwellian super-state on us.

In support he quotes the book Homage to Catalonia, in which Orwell wrote, in 1938, that England ‘will only be awoken from its deep sleep by the sound of crashing bombs’.

Unfortunately for him, this is the exact opposite of the point he wishes to make.

Orwell was in fact warning against appeasement of Nazi Germany, believing that England would inevitably become embroiled in wars between European sovereign states.

The EU has its origins in the 1950s, when six of the major European countries joined in an economic and political union.

This was seen by many as a way of avoiding the extreme forms of nationalism which had dev-astated the continent in the previous 50 years. I do not know whether Orwell would have approved of the EU in its current form, but it has certainly kept us free from crashing bombs.

Ian Brittain Wareham Road Owermoigne