SIR – I venture to suggest that 2016 will prove to be a date as important in the history of Britain as 410 AD (the withdrawal of Roman imperial governance from Britain) and 1066. No one should underestimate the importance of the referendum on June 23. Whether we vote to stay in or to leave the European Union, it will be the most decisive turning point in British history for a thousand years, as it would have been if we had been conquered in 1914-18 or 1939-45. A vote to remain in the European Union on June 23 is a vote to remain embedded in a United States of Europe, and the democratic deficit and bureaucratic tyranny which that entails. It is clearly foreseeable that the European Union is intended to become, and will become, a permanent and unbreakable union like that of the United States of America, and I fear that, if it has not already, the European Union will soon tire of member states seeking to renegotiate their relationship with, or membership of, the EU, and that within a few short years it will be as impossible for any member state to leave the EU as it was for the southern states to break away from the United States of America in 1860. In these coming months prior to June 23 we are entering the most momentous and decisive period in British history since those turbulent months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Our future now, as then, hangs in the balance. Nothing else in our post-war history compares with it. We stand, as previous generations have stood, at a crossroads in our island history. Suddenly, or so it seems, Divine Providence has been pleased to place the future in our hands. The baton has been passed to us. May we not fail the generations which have gone before us. Yours faithfully, Fr Neil Evans St Joseph’s, Neath