In my view, Name and address supplied has his priorities wrong if he believes, as he appears to do, that we should spend more on defence at the expense of the NHS (Letters, June 21).

Indeed, why do we spend money on defence at all?

What exactly is the point? Is any state threatening to invade us? We love to scare ourselves silly with dreaming up threats which have no objective existence — did you really believe that the Soviet Union was under any circumstances going to invade Western Europe? — and spending money we can't afford even on a terrorist weapon like Trident to deter these non existent threats.

What we actually use our weapons for is not to defend ourselves, but to attack other countries — North Korea, Afghanistan, Serbia, Iraq, Libya . . . The list is rather long.

At present,we are bombing somebody somewhere. We always seem to be at it.

All these invasions and bombings of other countries naturally make us enemies so we have a problem with terrorism which say Ireland does not have because it does not deliberately make enemies.

I am glad we are leaving the EU as it is clearly the civilian wing of NATO.

However, unless we leave NATO as well, which is clearly an aggressive not a defensive alliance and which demands we spend at least two per cent of GDP on what they insist on calling defence, it will be of little avail.

Malcolm Pittock

St James Avenue

Bolton