From the BBC
Author Michael Morpurgo - best-known for his children's books such as War Horse - believes the UK should stay in the European Union.
"I do know my history, and I know we've been at peace for all these years - and that has something to do with Europe," he says.
I know my history too. I know that Germany never really had any interest in France in either war, and that both invasions were because of factors outside the EU - the alliance between France and Russia in WW1 and the alliance between France and Poland in WW2.
The start of WW2, and what drove a lot of support for Hitler was his policy of lebensraum, of taking over bits of Eastern Europe to ensure food security after WW1 blockades. After the Germans invaded Poland, France and Britain declared war on Germany, leading to the invasion of France.
What's really created peace in Europe is the tractor and other agricultural improvements. No-one is going to invade bits of Polish or Czech arable land any longer. It's just not worth the costs. The tragedy is that the mass adoption of tractors started in the mid-1930s, and if that'd happened a few years earlier, things might have turned out differently.
I'm someone who believes that the EEC once worked because it was the "right-size" organisation for what we needed in the early 70s to the mid-90s, but it doesn't now. We trade with places like China, Vietnam and Africa in a way that we didn't back then. And we don't need a superstate. We've got organisations like the WTO to do global trade.
Debate Magazine
