Jeremy Corbyn must recognise that leaving the single market would be a disaster

Jeremy Corbyn is about to sacrifice the poor on the altar of his Brexit delusions.

He has created his own Napoleonic fantasy (like the arch-Brexiteers), blinded from a singular important truth and borne out by a deluge of rigorous research from economists, scientists, businesses and governments from across the world. That truth is that the world’s biggest and sophisticated market – the European single market – pumps Britain’s lifeblood, enabling the complex and frictionless supply chains that drive our prosperity (as well as providing an unparalleled and unanimous quality control compared with the Americas, Asia and Africa).

Leaving the single market is much worse than leaving the EU. It would represent the catastrophic culmination of shambolic negotiations that have made Britain look daft as a brush.

Stefan Wickham
Oxted

I’m not sure whether or not I support Lord Kinnock’s views but he is to be admired for pointing out, yet again, that our key political decisions makers are more interested in dogma than they are in a good outcome for our nation.

For that reason, I hope that enough Labour MPs defy the whip, and thus force the government into some serious decision making where our interests as a nation are put ahead of their concern about keeping their jobs.

Steve Mumby
Bournemouth

Those of us fighting deportations are heartened by the headline: “British people becoming more sympathetic towards refugees and immigrants”.

The public response to the unjust treatment of the Windrush generation showed that once people saw how deportation wrecks lives and the terrible consequences of a government’s manufactured “hostile environment”, they were horrified.

But the “hostile environment” reaches further than that. It extends to asylum seekers fleeing murder of loved ones, gang rape or starvation. Our experience is that the Home Office, driven by targets and incentives, frequently makes arbitrary decisions on asylum seekers’ legal cases with no reference to the evidence put before them. When they are turned down, asylum seekers can now be denied the right of appeal in the UK. And at that point they can be deported without notice. Legal aid cuts have made it almost impossible to get representation.

The architects of the “hostile environment” never expected to be stopped in their tracks by the public’s compassionate and furious response. The danger now is that the government will cut the Windrush victims away from other immigrants whose lives are more British than their passports.

Niki Adams – Legal Action for Women
Sara Callaway – Women of Colour, Global Women’s Strike

I applaud The Independent for hoisting the flag of racial equality and for championing community cohesion in the UK. It is not the victim mindset but we are in a mess now. April 3 was actually ‘punish a Muslim day‘.

Far-right parties, populists and nationalists, let alone racism, discrimination, Islamophobia, antisemitism, marginalisation and alienation, are on the rise in Western societies. This is reality, not fiction. During a lecture I attended, a student gave a presentation saying that Islam as a religion is incompatible with the UK and the West, that Muslims pose an imminent threat to the UK.

When I asked what the difference is between integration and assimilation and raised the issue of Islamophobia, the lecturer stopped me aggressively and told the student, “Do not answer him, you do not have to.”

Another time when I asked about the frustrations, emotions, feelings and what sort of rational thinking could lead to the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust, again the lecturer said no one understood the meaning of my question.

This sort of thinking fans the flames of racial hatred, indignation and intolerance.

Dr Munjed Farid Al Qutob
London NW2

Why is it so wrong to want to give our children the best education available in the area?

In my experience (40 years of the education system and recruitment), grammar school education prepares children for life after secondary education. This is not a “privilege” but a right. Why would we want to give our children less than the best?

In my opinion, education must give children the opportunity to achieve their best, reach their highest pinnacle of excellence no matter what “type” of school they attend.

Dogma ought not rule our head when it comes to our children’s education. We must simply strive to improve education for education’s sake and not to satisfy some outdated view of “them and us” or “privilege”. Each child has the right to expect to be educated within their compass of learning. Not all children have the same ability of learning. Some shine early while others take more time to mature. Some are academically minded, some are more practically suited and, alas, some find education difficult.

No matter what children’s educational needs are they have the right to be given appropriate opportunities to be educated to their level of competence.

With a sound base of education and a stable home life children will thrive, they will achieve their own goals – providing they have a plan. This is where, I believe, grammar education comes into its own by raising the child’s horizons to all the wonderful opportunities available.

Successive governments have wasted our hard-earned taxes on failed political dogma, foreign aid, HS2, Hinckley Point, nuclear warfare, and so on, when we ought to have been investing in the country’s future, namely, our children’s education and stable family life.

Our education system doesn’t do too badly these days. There are more students in further education than ever before achieving ever high examination results. Girls and boys do equally well educationally while girls are increasingly improving their status within the workplace.

More money must be found to reduce the harmful financial burden that students bear through university tuition fees. The bureaucracy that teachers have to endure has resulted in exceptional numbers leaving the profession early and too few coming into the profession. I am assured, by current teaching professionals, that salaries are adequate but the workload and staffing levels are causing severe strain on an already fragile education system.

Take the dogma out of the education system, stop playing with the future of our children, let educationists run our education system and governments ought to make education the number one priority for the sake of the nation.

Keith Poole
Basingstoke

The phone zombies who stride forward oblivious of anybody or oncoming cars need to be brought back to earth before they are buried under it. Here’s how:

1. Stab them through the heart with a wooden stake – it works for vampires (on TV) although it might not be the correct method for zombies.

2. Toot loudly or let them walk into your car – relatively safe and better than speeding-up as a first response, even if you want to.

3. Continue walking forward and let them decide where they want to walk. Generally if they are so self-absorbed that they don’t look up I will help them up after they bounce off me – I am a little overweight and I have time to brace.

Despite these odd suggestions, something needs to be done as a few have been killed. Their own safety needs to be considered but so does that of the people they walk into or the emotional upset of drivers involved in a pedestrian accident. No call, SMS or Facebook update is worth more than a human life.

Look up, look out and look forward to a great life.

Dennis Fitzgerald
Melbourne, Australia

I’m surprised that Donald Trump has banned Irn-Bru at his Scottish golf resort. I’d always assumed that because he is a teetotaller, the drink explained his strange orange colour.

Patrick Cosgrove
Shropshire