How Boris Johnson’s Brexit ‘conned’ us all – Yorkshire Post Letters

YES, indeed, Brexit has been “done” and, in that regard, your correspondent Mike Ridgway (The Yorkshire Post, September 18) is correct.

Accept Brexit as Liz Truss made Foreign Secretary – Yorkshire Post Letters

However, apart from his assertion that “Brexit has given us much greater national flexibility”, I cannot see any further benefits explained in his letter.

There is, of course, “our way of life of democracy and Brexit” that we are now enjoying.

After all the trials and tribulations of “getting Brexit done”, is this all that there is to show for it?

As a 78-year-old citizen who voted to remain in the European Union, I can list some of the things of which I, and my grandchildren, have been deprived.

Freedom of movement which I have enjoyed for many years allowed me unfettered access to all member states without the burden of passport checks and the like.

Freedom to live and work in the EU, as my eldest son has done for many years with his own translating business in Italy, now means he had to gain “residency”.

The Erasmus scheme allowed students to live and study in the EU.

I don’t read much about the much-vaunted benefits of Brexit. All has gone strangely quiet in that regard. I would like Mike Ridgway to explain how the European Courts of Justice were “interfering” in our lives, and also what exactly is the “Brussels power-grabbing Utopian future” to which he refers.

So, yes, Brexit is done – and so are we! European workers have shunned the “hostile environment” – hence some crops rot in fields; delivery drivers are in short supply; hospitality is hard-hit; much of the fishing industry has collapsed; abattoirs are short of EU vets; and there are unfilled vacancies in the NHS.

The list goes on but, hey, we “got our sovereignty back” (but not immigration control).

A pity that Boris Johnson didn’t study John Donne whose 17th century argument against isolationism might have given him pause for thought before he and his gang of no-hope right-wingers opted for this nonsense: “No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main...”

I realise that Covid-19 will be the reason given for all the present and future ills of exiting the EU, but they can’t con everyone for ever, can they?

They did with the false assumption of millions of Turkish people coming to the UK and the weekly £350m to the NHS, though.

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