YP Letters: Brexit just latest chapter in a long-running Tory civil war

CAN the present dilemmas, which now face the Conservative government and whose costs will be borne by the British people, be attributable to any group other than the Conservative Party?

In the early days (1973) of our membership of the EEC, the Conservative Party suffered divisions over our membership. These were to continue unchecked, through the Maastricht days and right up to and after the recent referendum.

In serving its own interests, i.e. a desire to hold on to power, the Conservative (and Unionist) Party in Parliament has failed the United Kingdom on a number of counts.

Successive leaders failed to discipline those who kicked against party policy on Europe. Even John Major’s basic Anglo-Saxon terminology didn’t do the trick. If these divisions remain as severe as recent top Tories have claimed, there were two honourable options facing the party – leadership to expel the Eurosceptics; and/or for the Eurosceptics to break and form a new party. After all, the Social Democrats, Jenkins, Owen, Rodgers and Williams, showed them how to do it.

Economists are now firing up prophecies of doom – and still the Conservatives unashamedly sit tight in Westminster, amusing themselves with political party games, even the new PM.

From: D M Loxley, Hartoft, Pickering.

IT is the statutory duty of MPs to represent the opinion of their constituents. The fact that some 13 million people did not bother to vote does not infer that they were content with the status quo. It merely means that they had no opinion one way or the other. They were offered the opportunity and ignored it.

While an argument still rages that the percentage vote to leave was not good enough to be considered definitive, the remainers should be aware that compared with the referendum in 1975 to join the EEC there was a swing of 42 per cent of the votes cast to leave the subsequent organisation, the European Union. Indeed, more voted leave (2016) than voted join (1975) and only a half as many voted remain (2016) as voted not to join (1975).

From: John Hall, Pennithorne Avenue, Baildon, Shipley.

THERESA May thinks that “the will of the people” requires only a four per cent majority to instigate major constitutional reform and great political, social and economic uncertainty, yet trade unions need 200 per cent to trigger mildly-inconvenient industrial action.