While Brexit is pushed off the front pages, the failings pile up - Yorkshire Post letters

THE ongoing farce of ‘Brexit’ has understandably been pushed off the front pages by the pandemic, but the failings keep piling-up to show what a huge mistake it has all been (The Yorkshire Post, May 22).

Our fishing communities are worse off than before facing masses of paperwork to get their produce over to the markets that buy it.

All they have to show for ‘Brexit’ are promises of some meagre gains in what they can catch years from now. The hospitality industry, already struggling because of the pandemic, is being hit by labour shortages as many EU citizens have left the country.

British migrants living in the EU face uncertainty due to changed residency rules which may wreck plans to work, or retire, abroad, whilst EU citizens here live ‘in limbo’ with an uncertain future. Shamefully some EU citizens arriving in the UK have even been locked-up and then deported!

Meanwhile the Government is making the UK the ‘desperate man’ of the world stage begging the EU to reopen the trade deal agreed in December.

No wonder – imports from the UK to the EU in the first quarter of 2021 are down by over a third whilst EU exports to the UK fell by only 14 per cent meaning the EU’s trade surplus with the UK increased to €35.8bn. Other countries see this and have the UK over a barrel when negotiating.

Take the Australia trade deal which even some former ‘Brexiteers’ are now against and farmers warn could damage our agriculture and countryside.

Taken all together it is little wonder that Lord Frost, the Government’s Brexit negotiator, says they are looking to recruit an “external adviser to identify post-Brexit opportunities”.

Yes you heard that right. An unelected government official looking to appoint yet another unelected bureaucrat paid for out of our taxes to tell us why Brexit is so great.

You really couldn’t make it up.

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

INTERESTING to read Oliver Collard’s take on what Labour should do to win back their core voters in South Yorkshire (The Yorkshire Post, May 25).

Not once did he mention the real reason why people have shunned them in recent years – trust. No-one trusts them on anything because some MPs thought they could ignore the democratic decision taken by the majority of Labour voters on Brexit.