I WRITE this letter on a rather poignant day known in Australia and New Zealand as Anzac Day. Hopefully, many young people will have watched the news on television and seen the memorial services in Whitehall and in Gallipoli. Many of them will never have heard of Anzac Day and will certainly know nothing about the fight for Gallipoli.

Read up on it and learn about how many Australian, New Zealand, Sikh, Canadian and many other Commonwealth people gave their young lives fighting for the freedom of the United Kingdom in both the first and second world wars.

Then, when you hear all our politicians, bar one party, professing how wonderful it is to be part of Europe, just think how the descendants of all those Commonwealth servicemen and women must feel. Let down big style. We the UK, ditched all our Commonwealth countries to throw in our lot with Europe.

Many people moan about austerity, but those same people do not give a fig that we left many Commonwealth counties to virtually rot when we joined the EU. We had a fabulous opportunity, rarely available to many, to develop the Commonwealth into a flourishing economic success. What did we do? Turned our backs on them all, no matter the sacrifices their people had made for us. A great number of them lost great markets and had to look elsewhere to enable their economies to survive.

They turned to China, Japan and other Asian countries. Some of those Commonwealth countries are still in desperate economic states, but you never hear their voices or hear about their poverty and austerity. Our politicians don’t care. Open your eyes and see how badly we have treated our former Commonwealth partners. We still have an opportunity to save and prosper with our Commonwealth family. Europe is not what you are being brainwashed into believing.

D J Pritchard, Rowan Way, Newport