Why are we putting ourselves through Brexit for no apparent gain?

In a week when we witnessed the UK’s presumptive Prime Minister spouting fishy nonsense about EU kipper regulations, it was refreshing to read an argument which was articulate, well-reasoned and factually based.

It was so different from the Brexit bluff and bluster of recent weeks when ironically Tennyson’s disaster poem the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ was quoted in a ‘do or die’ speech, the full line from the work, lamenting this British catastrophe being: “Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die”.

It has to beg the question as to why our country is putting itself through this harmful and humiliating process with no apparent gain for any of us? The immigration figures have not diminished: people are simply arriving from different places in the world. The health of the NHS has not improved and seems unlikely to do so. And, while workers are seemingly earning more, it’s only because they are working harder because business investment is drying up.

Leave campaigners used to talk about “the easiest trade deal in history” and “a brighter future”; more common now are phrases like “we’ll get through it” and “we’ve survived two world wars”. Did 17.4 million people really know they were voting for wartime deprivation and misery?

Perhaps it would be better to be mindful, in an uncertain world where great powers like Russia and China push their political and economic weight around and where large global corporations increasingly exercise control, that we are stronger when we work in partnership with other like-minded countries, as we do as part of the EU and NATO.”

Richard Cherry

Junction Road,

Burgess Hill