THE REFERENDUM debate, with few exceptions, has been focused on the advantages or disadvantages for the United Kingdom. How short-sighted can you get?

The UK, like every other nation, shares one planet we call Earth.

Those wonderful photographs from space, taken by astronauts from the space station, set before our eyes the unique human home on which we live our lives.

So far as scientists have yet discovered there is no proof that there is anywhere else in our galaxy of stars and planets which sustains conscious life forms. Whether we like it or not, all of us from every country survive together or perish together.

Never is this more true than now as children and grandchildren of every land face a future of increasing climate change, bringing the destruction of peoples’ livelihoods leading to forced migration.

Disaster can take many forms from a superbug disease to the exhaustion of traditional energy resources, all causes of war, civil or intentional. We no longer have the luxury of going it alone.

In 1915 my father was fortunately wounded so badly in the trenches near Lille that he was never fit to go back after recover, otherwise I would not be here.

The European Union was crafted, by those who had then gone on to survive after 1945, to lay the foundations of a peace-to-last, dug into a rock of ‘talk talk’ not ‘war war’.

That means a perpetual round of meeting, negotiation and decision making. It does not mean a shake of the shoulders and a huffy walking off. It means sticking with it and setting an example to the States who join. It means co-operation and mutual understanding.

There is so much to be done together, for the people of the whole planet, especially when the threats to all of us increase rather than diminish. Stay with it.

BOB NIND

Headington