MADAM,

It appears to me, four months after the referendum that it has the makings for our nation of an unmitigated self-inflicted disaster, with no feasible economic benefit in sight, but certainly years away from any real new source of even matching current income. (UK already does 55 per cent of its international trade outside the EU’s 45 per cent, which is by far the single biggest market).

Why politicians should now do better than real exporting businessmen, is not clear. Instead we have taken a massive gamble based on very bad, if not dishonest predictions, with which voters were deceived, the infamous and non-existent £350 million ’saved to benefit the NHS’, being perhaps only the most egregious example.

For me, although I admit to being perfectly happy to be a European as well as a proud Brit, like many others, I see no conflict. To say otherwise is like telling someone from Texas, that they are not also American. But apart from the entirely artificial distinction between us and our continental neighbours fostered, it has to be said to the point of hysteria (and still it goes on, day after day by the Daily Mail, The Sun and the unspeakable Daily Express), on the whole it is young people who ’get it,’ - what we the voters have done - many of them weren’t able to vote, and it is they that face the longer term consequences.

After the UK’s 43 years of rising prosperity in Europe, as a well established co-leader of the world’s largest  market, we have put our economic future, or at least 51.9 per cent of us did, to a real and unjustifiable risk for no obvious reward. In doing so we might even have broken up the 400 year old United Kingdom, if the Scots determine it is not in their economic interests to remain. Among my concerns from the time we leave, what worries me most, is the loss of the annual £66bn of tax revenue if the City loses its pan- EU "passporting" rights to sell (tariff-free) insurance, pensions, investment funds and general financial services into all the 27 other EU nations, for which London is currently the EU’s financial capital.

That’s just the loss of the City’s tax revenue to our national exchequer, from which is paid all the nation’s considerable costs. It can be seen with the current annual budget for the NHS (ref google) of £116bn, that this £66bn is much more than half of that and no one, including Monmouth’s MP busy with wretched immigrant or headline chasing, can tell us how we can replace that quickly two years or so down the line, for a service that it is generally agreed, needs more money not less.

On the upside, a ray of hope. It seems that it is parliament at the end of two years or so of negotiations to compare terms with our existing membership that will make the final decision, so all is not yet lost.

Since we live in a parliamentary democracy, and despite the overexcited tabloids with their self-interested proprietors, there is still hope with the exaggerated claims for Brexit unraveling, that by then we will all know much more about the real cost of leaving. Then among our 650 MPs across party lines, who will undoubtedly consult with their constituents, good sense might still prevail before we have gone so far as to actually leave the Economic Union.  

Clive Lindley

(Monmouth)