LAST week you kindly published a letter from me concerning what I considered to be intemperate language on the part of our Prime Minister. She has now been joined in the dock by Dr Liam Fox when he is quoted today using terms such as "hijack" and accusing Remainers of trying to "steal" Brexit ("May to try to sell Plan B as frustration rises in House", The Herald, January 21). For a Minister of the Crown and a member of the Cabinet to be using such language at this particularly sensitive and volatile time, is shockingly irresponsible.

This is of course the same Dr Fox who blithely predicted that “the free trade agreement that we will have to do with the European Union should be one of the easiest in human history”. Such rash statements and empty promises from Brexiters really do need to be robustly challenged. It would be very interesting to know how many "free trade" deals with other countries Dr Fox has secured since the 2016 Referendum? (I think that the answer is just one.) Are we really to believe that the UK will be able to secure better trade deals with these countries than the ones that we already enjoy as members of the EU? This is just one example of the nonsense that we are expected to take on board from the Brexiters.

Dr Fox knows very well that we live in a representative democracy where our Members of Parliament are given the responsibility of acting in the best interests of the country. The Brexit referendum was purely advisory and while Parliament voted to honour the narrow decision to leave the EU, clearly circumstances have changed dramatically. The full costs of our departure from the EU are becoming ever more apparent. We have the extraordinary situation where our leaders from finance, business, manufacturing, transport, the NHS, the hospitality industry, the academic world have united to warn that our country is facing perhaps years of depression. This stark analysis is confirmed by the Government’s own projections. None of the various options being touted round will leave the UK in a stronger position than we are just now as members of the EU. With Parliament so hopelessly divided, the decision has to be given back to the people.

Hopefully our MPs will not behave like their counterparts in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe and leave "that brain outside and vote just as their leaders tell ‘em to" but rather unite to act in the best interests of the people that they have been elected to represent and serve.

Eric Melvin,

6 Cluny Place, Edinburgh.

IN 1975, as a naive "Wilsonista", I voted to remain in the European Economic Community (as the EU was then called). I was too ill-informed then (as most voters under 40 are today) to realise that the EEC was the first big step towards the political union of Europe. Then, the political and media "sophisticates" (except Tony Benn) deliberately concealed the trajectory towards an end-state of European political union; now, the elites patronise and sneer at the working class who do not share their bourgeois superior vision and moral virtue on the EU.

In the 1990s (I am a bit slow-witted, you understand), I came to realise that I did not want a European superstate dominated by France and Germany, supported by a payroll vote of smaller nations, and funded disproportionately by the British taxpayer. I was against joining the euro, because a monetary union cannot work without a banking union, a debt union, a fiscal union and a political union. Accordingly, the single currency and its dogged maintenance has bankrupted Greece, brought Italy, Portugal, Spain and Ireland to the brink of economic disaster, and impoverished millions by unemployment. Even Germany (for whom and by whom the currency was designed) is teetering on the edge of recession. Yet those European countries not in the euro, but having their own flexible currency exchange rates (like the UK), create jobs and "do alright".

Furthermore, and after events in the 1990s in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia (remember the massacre at Srebrenica, and EU complicity therein?), Kosovo, and, more recently, Ukraine, it has not been the EU, but Nato, that has stabilised peace in Europe with British and American interventions.

Yet, despite the evidence above, Remainers inside and outside Parliament press on to keep the UK in the EU. But they cannot convince voters of the benefits of the customs union and the common external tariff, the single market, the "common rule-book", the Common Agricultural Policy, the Common Fisheries Policy and the supremacy of the European Court of Justice. Remainers may well succeed in destroying a real Brexit on WTO/unilateral free trade terms – what they call "crashing out", "no deal" – and imply the abrupt end of trade between the UK and the EU (all of which is absolute nonsense of course). All Remainers have to do is persuade Parliament to rescind Article 50 or to extend it beyond the scheduled departure date of March 29.

No doubt, as "good Europeans", Remainers would then expect the UK to participate in the European Parliament election on May 23. Would that election not constitute a second EU referendum? Would they not get hammered (even under proportional representation) by "Tell them again Vote Leave" candidates? Would they then demand a third referendum?

Richard Mowbray,

14 Ancaster Drive, Glasgow.

I GATHER that there are a group of hardcore Remain supporters who are rejoicing at the prospect of the "Deatherendum", the process by which the passing of senescent old dodderers (SODs) like me, who had the effrontery/prejudices to vote Leave in the 2016 referendum, removes us from the Electoral Register, our places being taken by a cohort of youngsters, whose enthusiastic, uncritical acclaim of the glorious European superstate would sweep Remain to a convincing victory in any subsequent poll.

While it is true that a disproportionate number of older voters tended to vote Leave (and were more likely to cast their ballots anyway), the overall narrowness of the Leave victory would lead me to suspect that a substantial number of SODs voted Remain. So unless these Remainers can precisely control where the Grim Reaper's scythe swings, they had better be careful for what they wish.

In the meantime, if it's not too late, I will be paying a bit more attention to what the health promotion campaigns advise, and practicing my kerb drills and other advice from the Highway Code more assiduously, just in case HRH Prince Philip is driving in the G76 postcode area.

Christopher W Ide,

25 Riverside Road, Waterfoot, East Renfrewshire.

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