Gisela Stuart is mistaken when she says Britain started to drift away from the EU when political union became a major issue (This was a divorce long in the making, Journal, 1 February). Her recollection is that this was not part of our original conditions of membership, but she is incorrect. Harold Wilson referred to the opportunity for political unity as early as 2 May 1967 (my source is Medium.com, which in turn quotes Hansard). Meanwhile, the Ideas on Europe website references a government pamphlet from 1975 about why it wanted to remain, including the wish to have a “say in the future economic and political development of the common market”.
The strange thing isn’t that we joined in the first place. The strange thing is that leave made such an iconic success of such a claim that had no basis in fact – and went ahead and won anyway.
Guy Clapperton
London
• Gisela Stuart argues that people voted to leave the EU for reasons of “community, identity and belonging” rather than on economic grounds. She is quite right. Likewise, the core of the remain case was built on precisely the same principles, as Ian McEwan so elegantly expounds in the same Guardian issue. The fundamental gap between leavers and remainers will always be unbridgeable because the two sides have antithetical views about the very meaning of being European. Even if the post-Brexit British economy flourishes as never before that will not diminish by one whit the ethical and philosophical case for us to get back into the EU at the earliest opportunity.
Robin Wendt
Chester
• Gisela Stuart is entitled to her opinion, and hats off to the Guardian for allowing her the space to express it. She does, however, abuse your hospitality by playing fast and loose with the English language. When “we” joined the common market in 1973, she was not yet one of “us” but still a German national. Nor does she make clear if she will retain her German passport and therefore her European citizenship now we have been stripped of “ours”.
Roger Woodhouse
Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands
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