MADAM,

Richard Wilson’s splenetic letter (‘Response to ‘massive overreaction,’ 10th August) compares Anthony Owen’s different view of Brexit, with his own curiously naïve belief in the promises of Gove, Johnson and Farage.

Does he still believe the ‘big lie’ of the Leave campaign that there will now be an additional £350 million available weekly, to spend on the National Health Service? Does he still imagine that seventy million Turks were ever bracing themselves to travel to live in our fair country? Is he even slightly ashamed at the Leave campaign’s deliberate obfuscation “Breaking Point," a giant picture of the sad middle eastern refugees who were not coming to the UK at all, with those EU citizens who under our treaty had the same right as we do to go and live and work in any of their nations. Given that unemployment in the UK is at its lowest for many years, those that are here can hardly be stealing our jobs.

Is he still convinced that a European Union Army is about to emerge from among ‘the 27’, most of whom like us, are already in NATO?  For a man who believes “sovereignty is all,” how does he square that view with the UK’s NATO membership, with British lives on the line, yet foreign generals and admirals telling our military what to do? Will he now campaign against the UN, since our membership of that institution unquestionably reduces our sovereignty, even though we enjoy the absence of world war?

His view of a second referendum, is understandable. He obviously fears that many who voted his way have now heard Leave’s false claims exposed, and more of the barrage of big problems that leaving will create, who might well vote differently, given another chance. Does he know for example that “Passporting Financial Services” to the other members of the EU on which the City of London currently pays £66 billion annually in taxation for the UK exchequer? The fate of this vast sum now depends entirely on whether our former partners, the EU of the 27 remaining states, will allow any of this to remain with the UK, given the hot competition from Frankfurt, Paris, etc; for what is after all, their EU market for these services. That £66 billion of tax take, now ‘up in the air,’ is substantially more than the UK’s current annual defence budget of £56 billion, or a massive chunk of the annual current £116 billion cost of the NHS.

When he feels it necessary to claim to be ‘a true patriot,’ it is to make the unworthy implication that his adversaries are not, but patriotism does not lie in disrespecting our trading partners. To agree that nation states should become and in our case were for 43 years, voluntary members of a powerful economic grouping, the EU; or of a military defence alliance: NATO; or a world governance institution the UN; is a mark of maturity, not an imposition, on a serious nation state.

Clive Lindley

(Ganarew)