Anushka Asthana (Weekend, 6 April) suggests we should feel sorry for the prime minister because the EU was tough on “no negotiation without notification”, thus precipitating the premature triggering of article 50. But the PM had choices. She did not have to trigger it at all, since the referendum was advisory rather than binding, and as she has subsequently shown such indicative votes might easily be ignored.
Having decided to consider triggering it, she could have spent time in evaluation of the circumstances that led to the result and options for their resolution, reaching a cross-parliament consensus for what the vote meant and the desirable response, before (if agreed) triggering article 50. At which point the EU would have been able to enter negotiations with a country that knew what it wanted. That this did not happen is the fault of the PM, who has visited this ill-considered disaster upon the country. We can hardly blame the EU. Sorry for her? You must be joking.
John Bold
London
• “When you think about it,” says Mrs May in her homespun video, “people didn’t vote on party lines when it came to the Brexit referendum” (Cabinet fury at May grows as long Brexit delay looms, 8 April).
No, in case she hadn’t noticed, it was a national vote on binary terms with a simple majority. Surely, when proposing to change the constitutional framework of a nation, at least a super-majority of actual voters, or, as in Scotland and Denmark, a 40% threshold of eligible voters is required. Then you have a more stable consensus. When only 37% of the eligible electorate vote definitively to leave the EU, you have a small tail wagging a very large dog with concomitant division and disagreement across generational, regional, national and political lines. Add a governing Tory party, now a minority government, calling it, losing it and negotiating it all on its own, and it is no wonder we are where we are – and will be for years to come.
Howard Richards
Dalton-le-Dale, County Durham
• Our two main political parties face an existential crisis that is of their own making. When the two major parties were a “broad church” they could claim to be representative of public opinion. Now that both have been captured by the leaver faction, they have effectively disenfranchised that half of the electorate that voted remain. The poor turnout at the Newport byelection (Report, 6 April)demonstrates the lack of enthusiasm for the two main parties. Scottish Labour shows what happens to a party that loses touch with the electorate – it’s rejected by the voters. The absence of a proportional representation voting system will prevent either major party being replaced by an insurgent SNP-like party as happened in Scotland. Instead, we will suffer decades of unrepresentative government, as the two main parties slowly go through their death throes.
Derrick Joad
Leeds
• In the Head to Head between Jess Phillips and Gloria de Piero (theguardian.com, 8 April), the latter bases her argument against a second Brexit referendum on the grounds that the vote was a working-class protest against the political class and would disrespect their legitimate grievance against Westminster’s indifference. She might care to read the work of Professor Danny Dorling, who showed that 52% of people who voted leave lived in the southern half of England, and 59% were in the middle classes, while the proportion of leave voters in the lowest two social classes was just 24%. Brexit was the fault of the elderly southern middle classes. Will she now change her mind?
Ian Ragan
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire
• Gloria de Piero dangerously underestimates the degree to which the UK is currently divided if she believes that “a second referendum will only serve to divide the country further”. A second referendum is the best, perhaps the only, chance we have of scrambling back from an unnecessary but increasingly likely disaster.
Geoff Key
Much Hoole, Lancashire
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