European Union in denial over Brexit and fishing – Yorkshire Post Letters

DID anyone really believe that we would be able to negotiate a deal with the EU? If you did then, with respect, I think you may be a little naïve.

This country has gone through political turmoil and hell for over six years dealing with general elections and a referendum on membership of the EU. The country decided to leave the EU with a resounding 17.4 million votes. If anything, the behaviour of the EU over the past four and a half years has made me convinced that it was the right decision.

The EU just does not comprehend the wishes of the British people – who won a democratically-held referendum – to become an independent sovereign state with control over its borders, laws, immigration and, as an island, its fishing waters. Very simple.

Fishing may only account for a small 0.1 per cent of our economy, but it’s an important emotional aspect of our psyche as islanders. I remember as a young photographer going to Hull to photograph the fishing fleet in the 1960s.

The fish dock was a stunning site in its heyday and my photograph went across half a page in The Times when it was a broadsheet. Later in my BBC career I went to Grimsby and witnessed the size of their fleet and bustling fish market over many years, culminating in the terrible demise for both ports.

No sooner had we joined the ‘Common Market’ or EEC – as it was then in 1973 – that Britain suddenly found we had been pushed out of our fishing grounds by the French, Belgians and Spaniards after being sold down the river by Prime Minister Ted Heath.

And this was on top of losing the ‘Cod War’ with tiny Iceland. I remember seeing trawlers arriving at these two ports with large gashes to their hull after being rammed at sea by the Icelanders. How sad that what was a great idea for European nations to trade together, it then turned – as warned by Margaret Thatcher in 1988 – to a political federalist structure with unelected leaders and rampant budgets that have never been audited and an voracious overpowering bureaucratic organisation?

The EU has never accepted our desire to leave and we have been treated as a pariah state and humiliated for years in all the so called ‘negotiations’.

From: Thomas W Jefferson, Batty Lane, Howden, Goole.

IN referring to Boris Johnson’s “much-vaunted oven-ready Brexit trade deal” (The Yorkshire Post, December 12), I fear you are over-egging the pudding. It was the Withdrawal Agreement that was oven-ready and it duly extricated us from our EU membership on January 31. That agreement included a political declaration which contained a list of possible ingredients for the trade deal, but the EU wouldn’t even let us into the kitchen to discuss the final recipe until after we had left, so a trade deal couldn’t have been oven-ready at the time of the election.

From: Ken Cooke, Ilkley.

BILL Carmichael (The Yorkshire Post, December 11) clearly expects Brexit to be a disaster and is already lining up his excuses.

‘Have your cake and eat it’ Brexit is the product of the unholy alliance between wealthy far right Tories, centred on the ERG, and sections of the discontented working class in the post-industrial regions of our country. It is the Empire-dreaming Conservatives who conned 17m voters to ‘Leave’ who own the mess that is Brexit.

There is no way they can shift the blame onto the nation’s true patriots.

From: Roger Backhouse, Orchard Road, Upper Poppleton, York.

BILL Carmichael blames everyone but the Brexit side for the failure to obtain a deal with the EU. I expect to see a lot more of that type of talk in the next weeks. The most ardent Brexit supporters spent long campaigns pointing out the EU’s faults. They should not have been surprised if the EU turned out to be exactly the awkward monolith they complained about. Worse, Boris Johnson is guilty of misleading the public. A year ago he won a big majority claiming that a Brexit deal was “oven-ready” if we only voted Conservative.

From: Phyllis Capstick, Hellifield.

WE voted to leave the EU years ago. Nowhere in the dictionary definition of the word ‘leave’ is there any mention of having to make a deal before leaving. It defines the word as “to go away from finally and permanently”. Only then can deals be entered into on an even footing.

From: Terry Palmer, South Lea Avenue, Hoyland, Barnsley.

AS an old ex-Labour Party member I’m getting ‘sick to the back teeth’ of listening to the totally undemocratic Sir Keir Starmer whinging on about Boris Johnson. Just to remind Starmer that Boris did get “Brexit done”. With or without a deal, he got us out of the EU ‘prison’ as requested by the electorate.

From: Brian H Sheridan, Lodge Moor, Sheffield.

I WOULD be more sympathetic to Dick Lindley’s views on Brexit if they were not couched in such xenophobic language (The Yorkshire Post, December 12).

When referring to European nations other than us, why can’t he call them “other European nations” instead of the sneer “Our European cousins”?

From: Geoffrey Care, Green Meadows Drive, Filey.

IT was with disbelief that this Government seeks to break a treaty if, or when, it suits them. But despite this, and much else besides, it was with horror to read that the Prime Minister is resorting to “gunboat diplomacy”.

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