THERE has been a long and sad deterioration in the rationality portrayed by James Bovington since the result of the seismic 2016 referendum when life on Earth, for him, must have taken a savage turn for the worse.

Scotland won’t stay shackled to xenophobic England and who can blame them? – Yorkshire Post Letters

His contention (The Yorkshire Post, January 22) that England wants to become “a nasty inward-looking xenophobic dystopian nightmare state” certainly needs a response. Surely, if this contention is his belief, he will soon be off to pastures new in his beneficent Utopia across the English Channel where immigration is not a problem except when numbers rise a bit worryingly.

What will Brexit mean for Britain's future relations with the EU?

Brexit demands Churchill qualities from Boris Johnson as Britain stands alone in new world order – Bernard Ingham

He will enjoy the company of all these forward-looking Europeans as their leaders push for a federal super state which, of course, is not the nightmare that we oldies fear but the ultimate dream. And xenophobia will hopefully disappear as the great European idea of eliminating the nation state progresses.

But he’ll also find, when he gets there, that a good proportion of European oldies hold opinions that are not a lot dissimilar from the views of our own “thickies” in believing that they reside in a Utopia that limits itself to the Eurocrats in Brussels whose main ambition, apart from consummating the founders’ ideology, is looking after themselves.

Brexit vindication as European dream ends – Yorkshire Post Letters