Brexit can mean anything Theresa May wants it to mean

In a fit of absence of mind Liam Fox said our industrial leaders are “fat and lazy”. He deserved their retort that he is a “portly fraud who hasn’t done a day’s business in his life”.

It is hard to imagine anything more likely to hamper an export-driven economic boom than our divorce from the EU and his talk of Brexit’s sunlit uplands is just empty rhetoric.

Fortunately the Leavers’ lack of economic thought and policy content means that while “Brexit means Brexit”, Brexit can mean almost anything Theresa May wants it to mean.

Leavers may believe the old Empire sea-lanes lie open ahead of us but the reality is it will take a decade or more to negotiate post-Brexit trade deals with the big economies.

John Cameron

St Andrews

Clubbers have always chosen to dabble in mind-altering substances and it is utterly naive to believe that outlawing them will achieve anything beyond projecting the outward appearance of being strong and decisive.

It is undeniable that prohibition has been an abject failure – it has never achieved anything apart from driving young people into the arms of unscrupulous drug dealers, thus making an industry which ought to be rigorously controlled dangerous both for suppliers and for users. When it comes to something as important as protecting the lives of our children, regulation is clearly the only answer. Driving the trade underground demonstrably leads to the loss of young lives and the inevitable gradual destruction of our night-time culture.

Julian Self

Milton Keynes

We still have a Secretary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt, who does not care about the harm caused to patients by the NHS.

We still have a Secretary of State for Health who is not concerned that NHS organisations ignore government standards of care and cause harm to patients.

We still have a Secretary of State for Health who cannot be bothered that the CQC fails to meet its remit as set by Act of Parliament “to protect and promote the health, safety and welfare of people who use health and social care services.”

We still have a Secretary of State for Health who does not care that he sends people to the CQC and they ignore you and do nothing to help.

We also have a government that does not care that we have a Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman that is unfit for purpose.

Edward Maszka

Address supplied

Is the Owen Smith currently slandering the Socialist Workers Party as being “anti-Semitic” the same Owen Smith who thinks there are "too many immigrants" in the UK?

Sasha Simic

London

Patrick Cosgrove (Letters 12 September) claimed “the secondary moderns became sinks while the grammar schools thrived” but was that really what happened? My third rate grammar school did not appear to thrive while I was there from 1955 to 1962.

At my school half (a considerable improvement on previous years) left at 16 and less than half the remainder made it to university two or three years later.

Meanwhile at the local secondary modern, the best of the rest were able to shine, no longer overshadowed by the geeks and unencumbered by endless homework, while learning practical skills that were invaluable when they transitioned to the world of work at 15, a year before their peers at the grammar school, who didn’t make it into the sixth form joined the workforce competing for much the same jobs.

So should Theresa May be considering bringing back revamped secondary moderns as well as new grammars and would that work if the so called grammar schools took 50 per cent of each cohort rather than the traditional 20 per cent? I very much doubt it.

Those who would have thrived at a secondary modern are those who now end up with Mickey Mouse degrees doing jobs they would have been better suited to had they started work at 16 rather than pursuing an unrewarding route to a debt burden they will never actually pay off.

Roger Chapman

Keighley

What planet is Janet Street-Porter living on (Want to improve the economy? Then stop idolising your 2.4 kids and have more of them, The Independent, 10 September).

Has she not heard about the rapid expansion of the world population of humans?

Does she not know how much damage the existence of another person in the developed world does to the environment?

Is she unaware of the increased risk of conflict when there is overcrowding?

Can she not imagine how unpleasant the world will be in another hundred years or so if we continue to reproduce at the present rate?

My husband and I decided, thirty-odd years ago, that though it might be nice to have four or five children, it was our duty to have only the replacement number of two. What was apparent to us then must surely be even more obvious now in the light of further evidence of global warming and the threat that it presents to global food supplies.

Large families may, in the short term, benefit the economy. But the economy only needs to be good enough to serve its society. Allowing society to be dictated to by the economy benefits no-one.

Susan Alexander

Frampton Cotterell