The Government awarding a £14 million contract to Seaborne Freight to run ferries from Ramsgate — which has not been used as a freight terminal for at least five years — in the event of a no-deal Brexit is not my idea of taking back control. Especially because at the moment this firm does not appear to have any boats!
Valerie Crews
Can’t help but wonder that if the EU had placed this contract how many posts we’d have had from Brexiteers claiming the work of an unelected, corrupt regime. Yet somehow they’re strangely quiet.
Mike Parfitt
EDITOR'S REPLY
Dear Valerie
I suspect the farce over the ferries is just the tip of the iceberg. We are going to discover that hundreds of millions of pounds have been wasted on preparing for a no-deal Brexit.
Get ready for a stream of National Audit Office reports into how Whitehall panicked and overpaid. Not only is it all a tragic misuse of taxpayers’ hard-earned money, it also risks destroying the reputation the Tories have built up since 2010 for spending public money wisely. Remember, this is not like contingency planning for some unpredictable natural disaster.
The Prime Minister could rule out the madness of a no-deal Brexit tomorrow. And Parliament could vote to prevent it this month.
George Osborne, Editor
Paddy called out the political class
Decades ago, at the Queen Margaret Union in Glasgow University, the late Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown was doing his best to run a public question-and-answer session while Socialist Workers Party types were doing their best to wreck it.
I asked him how he felt about the hiking of the parliamentary electoral deposit to £500, to which he replied that he’d no time for the “deterring frivolous candidates” line. Individual people and parties alike should not be deterred from standing purely on financial constraints.
When the SWP immediately shouted “What about the BNP?” Ashdown retorted “What about the Revolutionary Communists? They attempt to win power standing for their platform in open public elections, not by attempting to hijack Labour as you Trotskyites have done for decades. See what your handiwork brought us — Thatcher!” It’s a kindness that Ashdown is being spared seeing any more of what our political classes have become.
Mark Boyle
Spurs would be foolish to sell their top defender
TOBY Alderweireld has been ever-present in the Tottenham team this season. Yet there is speculation that in the January transfer window the Belgian defender may be sold as his contract expires at the end of the season. If he stays at Spurs until the end of the season, it is believed he could go for £25 million.
Spurs are making stupendous progress in the Premier League and it would beggar belief should chairman Daniel Levy decide to sell the star defender in the quest to cash in. The phrase “shooting oneself in the foot” comes to mind. The current squad is a unit carefully nurtured by manager Mauricio Pochettino and to remove a key component from it would be to disturb the fine construction.
Larry Sequeira
We need safer routes to get more people cycling
MOST cyclists will have agreed with Simon Munk of the London Cycling Campaign, [“Make cycling safer, don’t rebrand it”, December 20], who said that many people do not cycle because it is too dangerous and that cycle lanes are totally inadequate.
Why are we not using back streets that are quiet, cleaner and more interesting?
Cyclists find back routes in their local area, so why not create cross-London backstreet routes?
Dominic Kasteel
