Owen Jones (‘Soft’ Brexit is dead. Labour must embrace a people’s vote, Journal, 28 June) should do the maths and consider how the dynamic can change. He cites polls showing 39% for hard Brexit, 39% for remain and 13% for a soft Brexit. The threat we have to defeat is no deal, so the decisive divide is between the no-dealers and everyone else.
Sustaining the polarisation of 2016 as a limitation on the framework for the debate leaves soft Brexiters as a hinterland for the no-dealers and runs the risk that they will win. This would be bad news for most people because no deal with the EU means a deal with Trump – the NHS handed to US insurance firms, UK companies matching US conditions (no paid maternity rights and virtually no paid holidays) and the Tory MPs and mayors with plans for enterprise zones and free ports implementing them. Many of the 39% who back a hard Brexit do not support this.
Arguments about whether to remain in the EU’s political and economic institutions, or how much the EU itself needs to change and in what direction, are secondary to building a campaign to cut into the support for hard Brexit over the summer, thereby preparing the conditions to bring down Boris Johnson as soon as possible.
Paul Atkin
London
• Owen Jones writes that “most of Labour’s voters in its leave seats voted for remain: how does it win those constituencies without them?” One might equally ask how does Labour win any kind of majority without taking seats in Tory marginals where the leave vote was between 50% and 60%? The results of elections for councils and the EU parliament are a more reliable guide than scatter-gun opinion polls as to what is likely to happen if Labour becomes a convert to the remain cause.
Bolsover casts a long shadow. Write off those seats if you wish, but without them Labour will struggle to become the biggest party at Westminster, let alone have a chance of winning the 68 extra seats on its 2017 tally that it needs to form a government. Piling up grateful remainer votes in Tory seats where Labour is not the second party will, as Ukip and Lib Dems have often found, be of little or no help.
Dr Bryn Jones
Social and policy sciences, University of Bath
• Although Owen Jones’s conclusion about the necessary direction of Labour policy is right, his analysis of the Brexit crisis is wrong. There is no dichotomy between the “culture war” and the class politics that he supposes the former “pushes out”. Brexit is an extreme rightwing project, which is itself a manifestation of class war – a blatant attack by the rightwing financial elite, the people who brought us the last banking crisis, on the vast bulk of ordinary people.
The puppeteers behind Boris Johnson will insist that the huge economic difficulties caused by Brexit can only be dealt with by lowering taxes, even as social care and state education, never mind the NHS, go to the wall for lack of funding. The failure of Labour to take the lead in opposing their nonsense economics has been soul-destroying for those of us who want a more equal society.
Marie Catterson
London
• Rowena Mason’s report on Boris Johnson’s intentions (Suspending parliament to push through no-deal Brexit still on table, says Johnson, 27 June) reveals his likely strategy if he becomes prime minister. As early as possible, he will ask the Queen to prorogue parliament. Nominally this would be to allow time to negotiate with the EU. In practice, it will be to prevent parliament from bringing a vote of no confidence.
He will then ask the EU to change the withdrawal agreement by removing the Irish backstop, under the threat of a no-deal Brexit. If the EU refuses, as I believe it will, Britain will fall out of the EU on 31 October while parliament is prorogued.
If the Queen agrees to do this, then I – a lifelong supporter of the monarchy – will take part in a march to Buckingham Palace calling for the abolition of the monarchy. What is the point of a monarch if she isn’t there to defend the rights of her subjects and parliament against an effective dictator?
Janet Jones
Sevenoaks, Kent
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