Crashing out of the EU or remaining in – those have always been the only two options

In the light of May’s decision to postpone the Brexit vote we face an even more chaotic political scene than we have had up to now. The lady would surely have been better to hold the vote and lose it. Then we could have gone on to the next phase of the discussion i.e. whether to stay in the EU or “crash out”.

Notwithstanding last minute attempts to reopen negotiations it looks as though the binary choice last addressed in 2016 is still with us.

Andrew McLuskey
Staines-upon-Thames

Since 2011 the fuel duty escalator for motor vehicles has been frozen. During the same period rail fares have increased by more than 20 per cent.

It is evidently better for our air quality for people to travel by rail. Why do governments continue to penalise those who benefit our health?

John Laker
Marlow

Sean O’Grady writes today that “a future UK-EU trade treaty will require approval by 40-plus national and regional assemblies”. Does this mean that the approval of the Scottish, Welsh and Irish parliaments will also need to be sought?

G Forward
Stirling

Cheer up, everyone. According to former home secretary Lord Michael Howard in conversation on Saturday with Radio 4’s Nick Robinson, “Brexit will all have been worth it” as come 29 March 2019, we will have our freedom from the EU. Yet as someone who has grown up with the EU from the age of 20 in 1973 until today aged 65, I have never felt freer! Free to live, work and study in the EU, which I did as a French language undergraduate in 1975-76; free to be both British and European; free to have enjoyed a successful career as a foreign language teacher here in the UK with excellent contacts in Europe; free to own our own homes and to retire on good pensions.

If EU membership has been so bad for this country, how is it we 65 plus year olds, as the very first generation of British EU young adults, are not now suffering as its first pensioners 45 years later – as a result of not being “free” from Europe for nearly half a century?! I therefore cannot think of a better, more blatant example than Brexit of a national cutting off of one’s nose to spite one’s face, or as one reader put it yesterday “an open wound”, which may yet prove to be the single, most self inflicted wound in this country’s history to date.

Clare Park
St Helens

I understand that the big vote has been called off!

Another U-turn, another humiliation. In all honesty is it not time for Ms May to resign?

Then we need a government of national unity, cancel Article 50, and commence an independent public inquiry to see how we got into this mess, and how much money we have wasted!

Or will Theresa May talk robotic rubbish, hang on, and make the UK a bigger laughing stock?

Robert Boston
Kingshill

Let’s hear it for Nicola Sturgeon! A bold move against the government and a plea for unity.

Labour would do well to consider the “regions”. Most people in this country live out here.

Damn right it’s pathetic cowardice. This government are history!

Chris Bonfield
Address supplied

I am grateful that you highlighted the fact that the UK has the highest number of life sentence prisoners in Europe. I am also pleased that mention was made of the additional 2,598 prisoners serving Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) as of 30 September 2018. However, it is inaccurate to state that this sentence was used “for serious offences such as murder and rape”. Often it was.

But the list of specified offences in the Criminal Justice Act 2003 was wide and included many offences of moderate severity which may have merited a custodial sentence, but certainly not an indeterminate one. It is revealing that of the 618 IPP prisoners who are eight years or more post-tariff, 261 had a tariff of less than two years and 341 had a tariff of two years to less than four years.

Professor Gavin Dingwall
School of Law, De Montfort University