Drop your customs union red lines, Theresa May – Brexit voters don’t care about international trade deals

I have had many discussions with people who voted to leave the EU both in the lead-up to the referendum and since. At no time has the ability to conduct our own trade deals ever featured.

There is a section of the Tory party that believes this is a key issue but I have not heard any convincing argument that this is so. In fact there is much evidence to the contrary.

Several news commentators are indicating that staying within the customs union is all that is required to secure support for an agreement.

It will be howled down by the Brexit-supporting sections of the media, but when the dust has settled it is in my view the best compromise on offer.

JM Seagrave
Wellingborough

TV and radio commentators have morphed Brexit into Breg-zit. Breg to rhyme with Greg and zit as in pimple. Mispronouncing it doesn’t render it more palatable.

Martin Redfern
Edinburgh

It is great to see the London Fire Brigade finally putting pressure on the government to make sprinklers in newly built apartments buildings a legal requirement. But what about our schools? Should we not be taking action to make sure our children are as safe as possible? I would be amazed if there was a parent in the country who did not want their child’s school to be fitted with this lifesaving equipment. It is a fact that most new school buildings and major refurbishments do not incorporate sprinklers into their designs. This is woefully inadequate given the place schools have at the heart of our communities.

Will it take a tragedy for the government to bring legislation in line with Scotland and Wales? Let’s be proactive and ensure that we don’t have to witness a tragedy at our schools before this legislation is put in place.

Tilden Watson, Head of Education, Zurich Municipal
Farnborough

It’s great to see Theresa May telling MPs that “we all need to hold our nerve” as we walk like lemmings to the cliff edge. She’s had more than two and half years to negotiate and it’s quite obvious to every business in the UK that current arrangements inside the EU are far superior for our economy than any imaginary unicorns over the horizon.

She’s playing chicken with a united bloc of nations who know where their bread is buttered, even if we can’t see the wood from the trees. It’s shocking how cavalier she’s being towards the Irish on both sides of their border – the openness of which has been a guarantor of both prosperity and peace since the Good Friday Agreement. The backstop is a legal insurance to maintain that – should future (and not yet worked out) “alternative arrangements” not pan out. It will not be renegotiated.

Our politicians are not fit for purpose. It’s been a never-ending muppet show, without the jokes. We have been manipulated and lied to on a gargantuan scale because of an internal Tory party squabble, led by toffs and millionaires bathing in a colonial yesteryear – helped by a barely functioning opposition. The United Kingdom has never been more divided and another referendum, based on new facts, rather an old fictions, might just break the impasse. Otherwise, the hard Brexiteers are on course to break up an already broken Britain.

Stefan Wickham
Thailand

It is, as Adam Lusher has remarked, patronising to dismiss people backing Brexit as turkeys voting for Christmas. According to a recent opinion poll, 46 per cent of people still hold this view.

They see it not as an act of self-harm, but as a way of venting their anger at a ruling elite. Leave campaigners have conditioned them into believing the elite is a body comprised totally of Remainers. That’s despite these Brexiteers having within their own ranks rich and influential backers and politicians not just guilty of failing the “left-behinds” but, also, in pursuit of their fantasy, seemingly hell-bent on damaging Britain and leaving the poor even poorer.

When will believers in these deceivers realise they’ve been duped?

Roger Hinds
Surrey

Gavin Williamson is planning to squander £7m on developing squadrons of drones “capable of confusing” enemies. Well if anyone is “capable of confusing” people its Williamson, who boasts his plans will “strengthen our global presence, enhance our lethality and increase our mass”.

Williamson is proposing a defence policy – he’s reading aloud from one the Charles Atlas bodybuilding adverts they used to stick in the back of American comics which promised to transform puny runts into mountains of rippling muscle overnight.

The seriously deluded Williamson insists his half-baked plans will transform the UK into “the nation that people turn to when the world needs leadership” – summing up in one sentence the toxic mixture of conceit, self-entitlement, arrogance and pomposity married to chronic incompetence which lies at the heart of Theresa May’s government

Sasha Simic
London N16