YP Letters: Impact of Brexit vote will only be felt when we actually leave EU

MANY people in the Leave camp are attempting to gloss over the dramatic change about to be imposed on the British people by Brexit, by saying everything is fine, the economy is doing well, there has been no financial collapse. This is because we are still in the EU.

All the trading agreements are still in place, the inward investment is still here and the jobs it brings are still here. This will not change for at least two years. The likely timescale for the most dramatic effects to be felt is five to 10 years when jobs will be lost, factories will relocate and we will have far less favourable trading agreements with Europe and the rest of the world.

The whole process will not be finished for at least 20 years when we will finally hit the bottom of our economic decline.

Apart from massive economic benefits, the EU provides direct financial support to the regions, including Yorkshire and Humberside and, of course, our farmers receive direct subsidies and grants from the EU.

Education, science and medicine all benefit from close links with Europe in terms of exchange of knowledge, personnel, resources and funding. Other benefits are visa free tourism (both ways) and our ability to live and work in the EU.

EU migrants work in our hospitals, factories, warehouses, farms, catering industries and many others, supporting our economy and paying taxes. If they are causing local difficulties with numbers, it is the job of the Government and local authorities to make sure that we have the homes, schools and public services to deal with them. Not an overtly complex or expensive task compared to Brexit.

The decision to leave the EU is the most profound taken by a UK government in peacetime in the last 200 years. It will result in the loss of at least three million jobs and 10 per cent of our GDP. Brexit is a lose/lose situation. There are no winners.

Certainly not the people who voted for Brexit and who will lose their businesses, their jobs, their pensions, their savings and their freedom of movement in Europe.

This decision is based on a referendum where only 37 per cent of the total electorate voted for Brexit – 63 per cet of the electorate did not vote to leave the EU. This is hardly an overwhelming mandate. In fact it is not a mandate at all.

The whole process should be reviewed from scratch by an independent body. If the Brexiteers cannot produce any facts (and they have failed to do so to date), then all this Brexit nonsense should be scrapped and we should pick up from where we were on June 22.