Any broadcast including Jacob Rees-Mogg should come with a warning

News reports often start with the message “this contains scenes that some viewers may find distressing” and yet this warning is still not broadcast when Jacob Rees-Mogg appears on an hourly basis. Trust me this viewer is always distressed whenever he moves into view, like a character from a PG Wodehouse meets HP Lovecraft novel, giving his latest fantasy take on Brexit. If we have to see him before the watershed it is essential that news organisations take their responsibilities seriously and give suitable warnings.

John Murray
Bracknell

A number of MPs on all sides of the house have had death threats, but more recently some leave MPs. I feel that had the Tory party tried to bring people together after the vote then this kind of divisive politics would not have happened. Theresa May and the Tory press have whipped up people’s emotions with “enemies of the people” headlines which continue a “them and us” mentality.

This has done countless harm to our country. The Tory cabinet has not considered remain voters at all and generally people have not moved on from the vote in 2016. Had we had a proper leader in a crisis, who in such a close vote wanted to find a way forward and heal wounds, we could be in a much better place.

Nicki Bartlett
Cardiff

It should come as a surprise to no one that the vast majority of the UK population has no idea what the Government’s goals are for Brexit: the Government itself has no idea and even last week’s two-day cabinet meeting could not provide an answer.

There are periodic “clarifications” which raise more questions than answers, and every time challenge is raised it is met with an affected righteous indignation from the Brexiteers that we all should “unite behind the Prime Minister” as if that will solve the problem.

That will do no such thing. The core problem is that this whole process has not been thought through at all. Last week’s revelation that all parts of the UK are predicted to suffer economic disadvantage from even the softest of modelled Brexit options should be enough to make our leaders sit up and rethink.

After all, any public sector investment has to undergo a rigorous and published cost-benefit and value-for-money appraisal before being given the green light based on a favourable predicted outcome, so why is this strategic project for the UK economy not subject to the same criteria? If any corporate board was to do something similar which jeopardised shareholder interests, employees or pension funds, it would rightly be dismissed.

For too long the PM has uttered vacuous statements about how “Brexit means Brexit” and about “getting the best deal for Britain” but not once has it been explained what these mean or how they relate to each other. Even in her party political broadcast last week it was evident that she does not believe in the words she was uttering from the autocue.

Any dissent from the Brexit line is met with accusations of treachery and of being “undemocratic”, but the irony is that this refusal to debate and this blind adherence to an empty mantra is more treacherous and undemocratic than any questioning of the process.

As the fantastic Liam Fox has often said, no deal is done until it is done; it is therefore not too late to stop this utter folly. There is enough evidence to support a change in mind, to show that we need the EU citizens currently here and their future successors to keep our infrastructure going (we’ll need to let them in anyway after Brexit, so what’s the difference?), and to show that common sense should prevail.

The best deal for the UK is actually no Brexit. We just need an effective opposition to the Government to make that point.

Charles Wood
Birmingham

It is quite nauseating to see the discredited Priti Patel trying to reclaim limelight off the back of the sad saga of sex abuse by some NGO staff. Before she became the minister for foreign aid she wanted to scrap it. Then she became an ardent enthusiast as long as it was linked to trade deals. Now she wants to scrap it again. What a grubby opportunist.

Patrick Cosgrove
Bucknell

Your recent editorial (Britain has an alcohol problem that costs us all) is surely right in saying that Britain has a serious alcohol problem. Sometimes when I am obliged to walk home through a town centre around midnight it is like a playground with swarms of teenagers, many hardly able to walk, but, instead of being supervised by teachers, there are police in armoured vans or even on horseback. What has gone wrong?

I often visit Italy and France and see late at night groups of young people enjoying themselves but they are rarely in any way threatening, drunk or aggressive. This is our cultural problem deriving from our attitude to alcohol.

In France I have participated in family meals where children are asked if they would like a little wine, maybe watered down. Quite often they don’t even like it. But the tacit message that there is nothing special about alcohol is the important part of the transaction.

Here we persist in the belief that alcohol is for grown-ups and should be prohibited to children. This makes it an ideal vehicle for a rite of passage. Children may be attracted to alcohol because it shows how grown-up they are, and what child does not want to be grown-up, and maybe violate a taboo in doing so?

And, obviously, the more one consumes the more grown-up one is. If this bizarre attitude to alcohol could be changed then I believe that we would have less of a problem with alcohol, and certainly less binge drinking, because more people would know that drinking alcohol proves nothing.

Dennis Leachman
Kingston upon Thames

I see that KPMG has said that it will assist the inquiry into the failure of Carillion, while PricewaterhouseCoopers has been appointed to liquidate the firm. Forgive me if I’m over-simplifying but isn’t that rather akin to having Harold Shipman assist in the autopsies of his departed patients?

Julian Self
Milton Keynes