Dear Boris Johnson, if you want to serve the ‘will of the people’, perhaps you should stop tearing us apart

I voted Remain in the referendum on our continuing membership of the EU. However, I saw that as a single, one-off event. I do not still refer to myself as a Remainer. I am simply someone who voted that way in 2016.

I was, of course, disappointed that the country voted to leave the EU but my first words to my husband when the results were confirmed were: “Well, we’ll just have to make the country make the best of it, for the sake of the children and the next generation.”

Since that morning, I and other people who voted Remain have been labelled remoaners, doomsters, gloomsters, unpatriotic, traitors and worse. I think you will recognise some of these words since you have used them yourself and by continuing to throw similar insults and worse across the House, you are helping to sow division in the country.

The truth is that many people who voted Remain are reluctantly resolved to leave the EU – they just want to leave with a good deal that will promise a bright future for our children and grandchildren. I am tired and increasingly angry at being insulted by you and millions of other people who voted leave as though I am no longer a UK citizen of any worth.

I want the best for every person in the UK – however they voted. What’s more, we (including you, Johnson) will all need the cooperation and hard work of those of us who voted to remain if the UK is to be successful and able to carve out the golden global future that you envisage.

The “will of the people” cannot be exclusively the will of the 17.4 million – but the will of all our citizens. It is your job to bring those citizens together, to find common ground, to serve – and I stress the word serve – all of us.

Your divisive and despicable performance in the House of Commons on Wednesday made me doubt your willingness to bring the country together. Instead your sole motivation – and I assume that of your unelected adviser – appears to be to destabilise and destroy.

Dismiss, disrespect, depress and endanger half this nation – and our elected representatives – at your peril, Johnson. Your behaviour may just come back to bite you.

Jane Mogford
Gloucestershire

Increasingly “the will of the people” has become an earworm. To the point where I fear it will, because of continuous repetition by politicians and the right-wing media, lead to a public belief that it should supplant parliamentary representation as the only legitimate mode of democracy.

In more than half a century of political engagement I have always trusted my MP. That may not be the person I voted for, but I accept that she or he is better placed, better informed, better advised on matters of national importance than I can ever be. And, if I don’t like what my MP does in parliament, I can vote for someone else in five years. That’s democracy. The democracy that binds our society.

Hearing senior politicians describe parliamentary intervention as betrayal of the will of the people raises memories of the tactics adopted by countless dictators. If we start to believe that a version of “the will of the people” justifies sidelining parliament and is the only way democracy should be exercised, we risk changing the fundamental basis of a hard-earned democratic society. In the long run, that attitude could be even more damaging than Brexit to a UK that is tolerant, accepting of difference and willing to compromise.

Richard Hanson-James
Caversham

Geoffrey Cox, the attorney general is, of course, correct in describing this parliament as “a disgrace”. But his reasons for thinking this are wrong. This parliament is a disgrace because of the behaviour of members of his party in misleading the Queen and the public, and then reacting to the decision of the highest court in the land with a degree of hubris rather than the appropriate show of humility that such a decision should invoke. Any honourable prime minister would surely have resigned in this situation. It is clear that this prime minister and his cronies are many things but honourable they are not.

Brian S Everitt
London SE19

I was profoundly moved by Greta Thunberg’s impassioned address at the United Nations. Let us hope her stirring speech will finally pierce through the collective apathy of world leaders and serve as a catalyst for change. I applaud her courage and dedication to her noble cause that we should all embrace and emulate. This living dynamo should awaken the conscious of the world to the dangers of climate change.

Young people from all over the world, brimming with idealism, have offered us a moral compass and amplified the need for world governments to take action on reducing greenhouse gases which are an existential treat to all life as we know it.

Thunberg warned “that people are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction”.

We need a major shift from “not-in-my-backyard” phenomenon into a “not-in-my-lifetime”.

So, let us bid farewell to Thunberg as she returns to school in Sweden, and assure her that her visit has not been in vain. Her high energy and dynamism has already stirred many of us into action. We will prod and cajole our lawmakers to break the impasse and take action. We will shame our climate deniers and fossil fuel merchants and demand they put the survival of the planet ahead of short term profits.

Let us pledge that our new planet arrivals can fill their ting lungs with pure fresh air untainted with greenhouse gases. Greta, we solute you!

Jagjit Singh
Los Altos, USA

With a major company in administration and several thousand employees made redundant, it may sound callous to apportion responsibility for its failure. No doubt, a combination of adverse factors – from the state of the pound to anaemic consumer confidence in the face of Brexit – can be blamed for pushing Thomas Cook into insolvency, but external factors should not mask an important organisational malady which threatens the survival of similar corporations.

Over recent decades, certain recommendations of standard business models have been taken to the extreme to the detriment of operational efficiency. Notable among them have been concentrating on market share, mindless pursuit of market leadership and diversifying into different and even unrelated lines to supposedly ensure security. The result has been used to justify payment of absurdly large salaries and bonuses to top executives at the expense of creating overreached oddities that undermine the competitive essence of market capitalism and prove humanly impossible to manage effectively. Without taking notice of the trend, the tragedy of Thomas Cook may not be the last one.

Hamid Elyassi
London E14