THE UK Government’s negotiating position on leaving the European Union is rapidly descending into farce (“May’s blueprint on customs union after Brexit is labelled ridiculous”, The Herald, August 16). It is happy to leave the customs union and lose all the benefits of trade agreements which the union has negotiated over the years with many significant countries around the world. But Theresa May and David Davis now want the UK to remain a member for a three-year period after Brexit at end-March 2019, to give us time to negotiate our own trade deals with those self-same countries.

The one thing certain is that, whatever trade deals we finally negotiate with such as the United States, Canada, India, and China, these arrangements will not be as beneficial as the ones we currently enjoy as a EU member state. Our negotiating position will be much weaker, because the market we can offer in the UK and our buying power are both much smaller than the EU whose deals we currently benefit from. And anyway negotiating new deals with each of these separate countries will take a lot longer than three years – the US and Canada have already been negotiating for nine years and have not yet reached a final trade agreement.

Why should the European Union concede such a temporary arrangement to us anyway? There is no obvious benefit to it, and there is no need to make generous concessions to a member determined to leave on its own terms. It is more likely to drive as hard a separation arrangement as possible, if only to discourage any other EU member from considering taking the same course as we have so disastrously chosen.

And all this because we mistakenly wanted to close our borders to protect our jobs from being taken by incomers from other European nations, which in most cases our own workers did not want to do or were not trained or qualified for. And how will the NHS cope with the loss of many thousands of European nurses and doctors who will have to leave the country after Brexit?

It is already becoming tragically clear that the 2016 referendum decision was a catastrophic mistake, partly by a complacent and weak Remain campaign and partly by grossly misleading information from the Boris Johnsons and Nigel Farages who led the negative campaign. I am sure history will judge them harshly, but it is not they who will suffer the economic consequences.

Iain AD Mann,

7 Kelvin Court,

Glasgow.

MY wife and I have been watching the excellent, and sometimes harrowing, series of programmes on the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and it shows a clear resemblance to contemporary events. Prior to the 2016 referendum, the Government lied consistently to us, had made no contingency plans in the event that the country would, disastrously in my opinion, vote to leave the EU. It now appears to be making things up totally on the hoof – not unlike the drawing of the Indian-Pakistan border in 1947 days before partition.

Like partition where Sir Cyril Radcliffe left and was never seen again, the orchestrators of Brexit have departed (David Cameron and Nigel Farage) after leaving us in an utter mess. The days of Empire are thank goodness long gone - look at the mess that we have left in many of the countries that we ruled over.

The Government cannot and must not think that it can just dictate to the EU how the customs union will work. We may still (just) be the United Kingdom, however the great has long gone out of Great Britain.

Steve Barnet,

Broom Park,

Gargunnock,

Stirling.