YP Letters: A weakened EU is bad news for world, not cause for glee

ME Wright rightly condemns Bernard Ingham’s schadenfreude at our scuttling the EU’s struggling ship as “chilling and un-British” (The Yorkshire Post, April 3). A weakened EU, let alone a moribund one, is an alarming development for world order but the notion that we are ‘all right Jack’ after pulling up the ladder is not worthy of a great nation.

The Little Englanders, and I make no apology for using that fecund term, who bang on about too much overseas aid are the same people who want to set sail in the good ship Britannia and “put the Great back in Britain”.

Heaven knows the French have their problems but they were among the very first to offer aid to disaster-stricken Colombia. Come on, Sir Bernard, we are better than this.

From: John Cole, Oakroyd Terrace, Baildon, Shipley.

SO the starting gun has been fired and we are now negotiating our way out of the European Union.It is nine months since the referendum result. Gradually but constantly the rhetoric of the Brexiteers has been toned down.

The promises of June last year are one by one being betrayed – and reality is breaking in.

We were promised £350m per week repatriated from Brussels to be spent on the NHS. This figure was almost immediately shown to be false – but was adhered to by the Brexiteers, who have scant regard for the truth. Now it turns out that rather than cash flowing back to us, the UK is liable for a one-off “settlement of obligations” figure of 60bn euros.

Questions about the sovereignty of Gibraltar have now raised their head. The Spanish government has spotted the opportunity presented by the Brexit negotiations to bring this to the table. Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and co. did not spot this one coming as they sold their snake oil to the UK electorate.

As a nation, we need to reflect soberly on what we were promised, what looks like being delivered and the distance between them.

From: Nick Martinek, Briarlyn Road, Huddersfield.

THERE is something rather pathetic about the various self-appointed Presidents of the EU as they flounce around threatening us with ever more punishment, ruin and desolation. It is so surreal, it’s almost Gothic. Of course it is even more pathetic that our home grown Remainers should believe them, but they do.

Our shrinking band of truculent Remainers mimic their EU masters’ bewilderment at the new order.