Sir: Liam Byrne's breathless panegyric ('Rise up, Englishmen', 28 April) on the glories of being British must have left some of us pretty punch drunk.

This is a man who eagerly serves a government that has spent a decade transferring the rights of the British to govern themselves out of Britain and assigning them to an EU government in which his own country has 8 per cent voting stock.

Most of this has been done covertly, out of sight of a sycophantic House of Commons and without a referendum.

This is a man who has been happily destroying what was once Europe's finest constitution and calling it reform. This is a man who reveres an outgoing mountebank who hopes, as his last act, to railroad into law the Merkel EU constitution, a major step towards the superstate and its commensurate end to the nation-state. And once again, without asking the people by referendum despite an earlier binding pledge.

If Mr Byrne loves his country, he has a damnably weird way of proving it. …