THIS month contained two dates of which all British people should be aware, June 6 and June 18. These are, respectively, the dates of D-Day and the Battle of Waterloo.

Regrettably, a majority of people under 40 will not know much about, or understand the significance of these events. Our children are simply not taught about British history as previous generations have been. It used to be believed that, for a people to know where they were going, they had to know where they had come from, and to understand and share the same values.

British society has been based on the rights, responsibilities and liberty of its individuals. Our law works (at present, anyway) on the basis that individuals can do anything they wish to, except those things prohibited by law for the good of society. Our laws are supposed to be made by representatives we have voted into office, and can therefore remove. This is fundamentally different to the continental European, or "Napoleonic", concept which holds that individuals have no rights, except those given to them by the state.

We now seem to be prepared, through a mixture of apathy and ignorance, to surrender these values. Millions of people have attended Jubilee celebrations this month, with no realisation the UK may not even exist, as such, within ten years!

The French Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, made the first modern attempt to create a centrally governed European super-state; the second attempt was by the German dictator, Adolph Hitler. The third attempt, this time peaceful and stealthy, is taking place today, not far from the battlefield of Waterloo, in Brussels. We British don't seem to know, or care, where this project is taking us.

Although Napoleon lost at Waterloo, many of his ideas have now come to pass: the idea of Europe as a single state, with a single currency, a single set of laws, a single set of codes by which European society lives.

Today's European Union is intended to be benign, and its promoters say it has nothing to do with Napoleon, still less Hitler. However, the EU's aim of a federal government, with ultimate power at the centre, is remarkably similar to Napoleon's and Hitler's plans, which the British fought to prevent at Waterloo and again on the beaches at Normandy.

Should we not, in this Jubilee year, think a little more about our future within the EU, before we allow ourselves to be fully immersed in it?

Mr R G Spencer, Court Road, Malvern.