Sir, – I can appreciate your intention to provide balance on the Brexit issue. However, the article by Ella Whelan representing "people on the left like me" was so full of holes that it should be recycled into a colander ("A second Brexit vote will destroy what little trust is left in British politics", Opinion & Analysis, February 28th).
She speaks of “middle-class Remainer membership in places such as London”, as if there were other places in the UK comparable to London with its population approaching 10 million.
She compares the suggested people’s vote on Brexit with the occasions when Ireland voted again on EU treaty matters. This ignores the facts that the Irish voters were not voting about vital in/out membership, Brexit wasn’t the brainchild of the EU, and the EU has never put on any pressure for a second Brexit referendum.
She cites “historic mass cynicism about politicians” but then says of a second referendum, “Once you’ve lost our trust, you might not get it back”.
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So were people already cynical or not?
Ms Whelan refers to the left’s “sense of defeat that has pervaded British society since the Thatcher years”. I presume the election of Labour governments from 1997 to 2010 passed by unnoticed in the circles in which she moves.
She castigates Anna Soubry as a member of the “ramshackle” Independent Group (please, the group has barely existed for a week) for failing to maintain her support of Brexit. Perhaps the reason for that is that Ms Soubry has learned something over the past two years while Ms Whelan has evidently learnt nothing.
If the 2016 referendum offered a “cake and eat it” option for leavers, the last two years have shown that such an eventuality was never possible.
We know only too well that the Irish Border situation was generally ignored during the referendum and has been, at best, fudged since.
All of the UK government’s own forecasts suggest that even the mildest form of Brexit will have negative economic consequences for the foreseeable future.
The notion that the UK (population 60 million) will obtain better trade deals than the EU (population 500 million) flies in the face of all economic sense.
With an almost 50-50 vote the first time, it is ludicrous for Ms Whelan to say that a second vote would completely destroy any remaining trust in politics for an “entire nation”. On the contrary, it is not just politically expedient to put the facts back to the British people, it is morally imperative. – Yours, etc,
KEVIN O’SULLIVAN,
Letterkenny,
Co Donegal.
Sir, – Ella Whelan is correct, of course. A second referendum on Brexit would indeed destroy what little trust is left in British politics.
To those proponents of a disingenuously named “people’s vote”, however, this doesn’t matter.
To the ultra-Remainers in and outside of Westminster the only thing that matters is keeping Britain in the EU.
In fact, one suspects this is why a second referendum is such an appealing prospect to those who have spent nearly three years campaigning to overturn the original one. A second referendum would destroy trust in British democracy but it would destroy it for the type of people that Westminster considers an annoyance at best, so it’s a win-win situation.
The Brexit referendum was the largest democratic exercise in the UK’s history. The turnout was a massive, record-breaking 72 per cent. By comparison, our own much-publicised, debated and agonised-over referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment was carried with a voter turnout of 64 per cent – still very healthy but not in the same ballpark.
Those millions of disenfranchised voters who were roused from their slumber to actually engage with the political process in far-off corners of the UK did so with a healthy dose of scepticism that the establishment would ever follow through on the Brexit vote, should Leave win.
Much to the establishment’s surprise, Leave did win, and a second referendum is just one weapon in the armoury of those who are keen to thwart this democratically expressed wish. (The added bonus being that the people who voted for Brexit in the first place may not bother to turn out for a second referendum if their perfectly justified fears that 2016’s “once in a generation” vote would turn out to be a stitch-up are proven to be correct).
While it’s always interesting to be reminded just how contemptuous the likes of Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell are about democratic votes that don’t go the way they would have liked, it’s all academic, really because – as Liam Fox and others have stated – there is virtually zero chance of a second referendum – quite simply because the people have already voted and there is no appetite for it outside of the Westminster bubble, populated as it is by a small but very vocal cabal of pro-EU people who get a lot of air time on Sky News and in publications like The Irish Times.
The only reason Jeremy Corbyn is pretending to back a second referendum, which Remainers forlornly hope will keep the UK tethered to an institution he is on record as hating for the last 40 years of his political life, is in order to stem the flow of pro-EU MPs from leaving his beleaguered party. The fact that he knows pretty much for certain that a second referendum won’t happen is the sole reason Mr Corbyn has gone against every fibre in his being and endorsed campaigning for one. – Yours, etc,
SIMON O’NEILL,
Dublin 3.
A chara, – Bobby McDonagh breezily admits there would be “some fallout beyond Britain’s shores from a no-deal Brexit” (“May using Nixon’s ‘madman theory’ to play chicken with Brexit”, Opinion & Analysis, February 27th). The “fallout” would include the decimation of the Irish agri-food industry. – Is mise,
BLAIR NOONAN,
Dublin 6.