The referendum will not decide whether the state we belong to is the EU or the UK, as Jacob Rees-Mogg claims (“Something rotten in the state of the union”, 12 March). When we last voted on the matter, the Common Market was not described to us as a mere alliance without the “symbols and powers of a state”: it was clearly a great vision of some future harmony.

But the strangest argument Rees-Mogg puts forward is about what he calls “democratic legitimacy”. In a Britain where the rest of us are obliged to put up with decisions handed down to us by a London increasingly inhabited only by the very wealthy and the very privileged, the claims that he makes about the tyranny of Brussels could be more plausibly made about the tyranny of Westminster.

Mark O’Sullivan
Bath