Readers on the consequences of leaving the EU, and the need for opposition parties to hold the government to account for its broken promises
John Harris’s excellent article (The gap between reckless Brexit promises and reality will soon be too big to ignore, 18 October) was extremely sobering. “What happens,” he asks, “when some watershed is reached, and the fact that people were conned becomes inescapable?”, linking the way public trust was undermined by the Iraq war and by Brexit. Both before war was declared on Iraq, and also before Brexit was enacted, some 1 million people marched through the streets of London in opposition. These people were engaged, informed, enlightened folk from across the country, committed enough to march for policies that to them represented the right way forward, for Britain and the world. The governments of the day ignored them.
The consequences of the Iraq war and Brexit are now all too clear. We should not have made war; we should not have left Europe. As John Harris says: “People in the political mainstream – by which I chiefly mean Labour MPs – need to start loudly talking about Brexit … and what life outside Europe is doing to us.” Absolutely. I feel sure there are millions of voters desperate for Keir Starmer, the shadow cabinet and all Labour MPs, at every opportunity, to do exactly that.
David Curtis
Solihull, West Midlands
