The Spectator

Letters | 18 July 2019

Leave we must

Sir: It is interesting that as the Brexit process drags, people become more distanced from what was a simple decision made at the referendum. The question was stay or leave, and the decision was leave.

In last week’s letters, Mark Pender writes that it is a mystery to him why MPs continue to support the decision to leave despite knowing it is against the country’s interests. I would venture to say that it is most certainly not ‘known’ to be against the country’s best interests. Pender goes on to say that this decision flies in the face of advice ‘from the civil service and others who have a strong understanding of the subject’, which smacks of the same deference to so-called ‘experts’ that many have had enough of. The hopelessly wrong claim from the Treasury that 500,000 jobs would be lost on voting to leave should prove we do not know what will happen.

My own view is that the UK is such an energetic and economically and culturally rich nation that it would have been fine if it stayed in the EU and it will be fine if it leaves. The country will not, however, be fine if politicians change the rules to try to sneak their way out of following through on the democratic decision to leave.
Rhys Weyburne

London WC1

No prep for no deal

Sir: Anthony Browne suggests that fears of a no-deal Brexit are analogous with the ‘millennium bug effect’ where he says, despite predicted disaster, nothing happened (‘Who’s afraid of no deal?’, 13 July). But that’s wholly misleading. It’s true that disasters were largely (not entirely) avoided. But that was only because warnings were heeded and acted upon — necessitating vast amounts of detailed, difficult, boring and unglamorous work.

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