Boris Johnson's 'oven-ready' Brexit has exploded in the microwave - Yorkshire Post Letters

Project Fear has now turned into Project Fact.

The old “oven ready” Brexit deal that Boris Johnson said would make sure that “Brexit got done” has exploded in the microwave.

The latest saga in the Brexit fiasco, whilst being a welcome attempt at a solution to the Northern Ireland Protocol, has just highlighted how ridiculous and non-sensical our whole exit from the EU has been.

Rishi Sunak is telling everyone that “Northern Ireland is in the unbelievably special position...in having privileged access not just to the UK market...but also the EU single market”. Yes, England, Scotland and Wales used to have access to that market too – wasn't that amazing!

Rishi Sunak thinks that it’s a fantastic opportunity for Northern Ireland. It was for us too before the Tory right wing and Nigel Farage put the boot in.

Yet neither Scotland nor Wales voted to leave the EU. The whole reason for joining the EU in the 1970s was that the UK had become “the poor man of Europe” and had begged the European Community to let them join.

We enjoyed years of frictionless trade until David Cameron decided that he was going to solve an internal Tory party problem by making it a problem for the people of the UK. Most people did not realise what leaving the EU would mean and many were duped into believing that we would enjoy “the exact same benefits”.

With the benefit of hindsight, we were never going to be better off outside the EU. Now our GDP has been reduced and we are the only European country in the G7 that is not showing an improvement in economic growth. We could blame the pandemic or the war in Ukraine, but deep in our hearts we know it is because we Brexited.

Meanwhile in the UK there are shelves empty of produce and small businesses going to the wall because it is too expensive to export to the EU. We have trade deals around the world which benefit the other countries involved but not ourselves. Brexit is still the elephant in the room. The grown-ups need to start talking about closer ties with the EU now.

From: Paul Morley, Ribblesdale Estate, Long Preston, Skipton.

Richard Wilson of Leeds for Europe believes that Nicola Sturgeon is a loss to British politics but may assist the campaign to get the UK back into the EU. Surely this is proof that some people are definitely living in a parallel universe to the rest of us.

His idea that because people are not happy with how Brexit has turned out means that they all want to rejoin the EU is nonsense. I’m not happy how things are progressing, but it is only what I expected. You didn’t have to be an Einstein to realise that those in charge of the EU would make everything as difficult as possible to make us suffer. On its own this would have been bearable had everybody in the UK got behind and supported the fact that we are once again a sovereign nation. But unfortunately progress is being hampered by those who will do and say anything to wreck Brexit and get us back in the EU, from Remainer politicians and civil servants right down to the minnows like Leeds for Europe. They are the ones who are making the transition much harder than it needs to be.