YP Letters: CBI's warning of Brexit job losses should fall on deaf ears

THE CBI has warned that it would cost the UK £100bn and one million jobs if we leave the EU. The CBI record for predicting outcomes is very poor so this warning should be treated with extreme caution.

Before the Equal Pay Act came into effect in 1975, they warned it would cost women their jobs. It did not. There are more women in work now than before. The CBI warned that a minimum wage would cost two million jobs. It did not. More people are in employment now.

I have noticed that ex- European Commissioners are failing to declare that their very generous pensions are at risk if they fail to promote the EU. Why are the media allowing them to avoid declaring a financial interest?

From: Jack Brown, Lamb Lane, Monk Bretton, Barnsley.

AS the great American journalist Gene Fowler said, memory is a Coney Island mirror. Alan Johnson (The Yorkshire Post, March 11) certainly has a distorted view of his own history if he remembers his 1975 vote as a “great move forward”. Edward Heath took that great leap into the dark without a vote in 1967 and the 1975 vote was about either the status quo or Britain’s continuing decline into a low-wage service economy.

We would never have never betrayed our continental history if there had been a vote in 1967 when British farmers received State subsidies to be the most efficient food producers in the world, we still had a major deep-sea fishing fleet and thriving coal, steel and manufacturing industries.

As a delegate to the Labour Party Conference, I can testify that the 1975 referendum was a compromise. It papered over a deep divide between a majority of members and those led by the Cabinet “Gang of Four”. Living on a council estate with four children, I voted for their future to be as free and exciting as my past in the global Commonwealth. Forty-one years later, we have renewed hope of glory in that boundless world. All we need is the faith of our forefathers.

From: Philip Guest, Everingham Park, York.

THE French air traffic controllers seem, like many French unions, to think that they are furthering the revolutionary traditions of France. In reality, they are just a selfish interest group The sooner a French version of Maggie arises, the sooner France’s economy, and the lot of European travellers, will improve.