The business community understands Brexit – we should listen to them in the event of a Final Say referendum

Please send your letters to letters@independent.co.uk

Emily Thornberry is wrong to say that Remainers dismissed Leave voters as being stupid, racist and manipulated. Some academics warned before the referendum that Brexit would never happen because our complex relationship with the EU would be far too difficult to unscramble.

Given these complexities, we were all inadequately briefed to take such a momentous decision, with so few of us understanding the full extent of our manufacturing, trading, exporting and other commercial links with the EU, never mind being aware of a whole range of subsidiary issues affecting travel, healthcare, policing, security, product standards, scientific research, etc, about which the vast majority of us had no professional knowledge at all.

Voters were legitimately worried about the scale and impact of immigration, and the little apparent action of successive governments to mitigate its effects on some communities. There was also some nostalgia for our great trading past and a perfectly reasonable hope that, freed from the shackles of Brussels, we might recover some of our outward-looking buccaneering spirit.

Because people feel strongly about these issues, on both sides the debate has been characterised by hyperbole and some bending of the truth. Finally there is little doubt that the referendum result was to some extent a cri de coeur from an electorate fed up with the failure of successive governments, amid the petty squabbles of Westminster, to get to grips with many real problems in our society – problems, ironically, from which the whole Brexit process has distracted this government ever further.

But now we do have to weigh very carefully the known benefits of our EU membership – granted that it does have some downsides too – against the possible but highly speculative advantages of leaving this huge trading block with which we have developed so many complex integrated manufacturing and supply chain links.

All of us, if we are to vote again, need to listen, especially to what is being said by major industrialists and a wide range of small businesses about the likely deleterious impact of any form of Brexit on the British economy, on our GDP, on the tax take, and therefore on our future national prosperity.

Much more than grandstanding politicians of all stripes, the business community really does understand these issues.

Gavin Turner
Norfolk

Referendums aren’t general elections

If Hilary Barber – (Letters 25 September) – is saying that the original EU referendum is analogous to a general election and that every five years we can reconsider our vote, then logically every so often we should have another referendum on EU Membership shouldn’t we?

At what point would this end, after five years, 10?

Mark Thomas
Cambridgeshire

A Remain option won’t alienate Labour’s voters

I can understand why some in the higher ranks of the Labour Party oppose including the option of Remain in any second referendum. Certainly it risks alienating a proportion of Labour’s traditional working-class support, and although that conceivably jeopardises their chances of government, I think that risk is overstated. Not only are 90 per cent of paid-up Labour members wanting to Remain in the EU, but the party’s wider support base is far more middle class, metropolitan and pro-EU nowadays.

Furthermore, a pro-EU general election – whether after or linked to voting to remain – would attract a great many Lib Dem and otherwise floating pro-EU voters, thereby cancelling out the losses. It would then be a Labour government’s top priority to address the non-EU related issues that caused so many austerity-ravaged areas to vote for Brexit.

In that way, losses of traditional voters might only be temporary. I’m not a natural Labour voter, but under those circumstances, and coupled with a zeal to reform the EU from the inside, I might well become one. I’m already partly seduced by Jeremy Corbyn’s promise to pump billions into green industries.

Patrick Cosgrove
Shropshire

They’re not laughing any more, well actually, yes they are

The laughter that greeted President Trump at the UN was unexpected and very unusual in such an august setting. His response: “Didn’t expect that reaction, but that’s OK”, suggests that he didn’t realise what was so funny.

American politics has often been a rich source for comedians, as was demonstrated hilariously by comedian Tina Fey, who simply repeated the words of then presidential running mate, Sarah Palin.

It appears that this time the humour comes from a perceived disconnect between what is said and what is the reality. Claiming more than what is due is a standard characteristic of a politician, so that shouldn’t be seen as unusual or funny. There is a need for both a speechwriter and a speech checker to confirm the content.

It’s time to go back to repeats of Seinfeld, which was a comedy about nothing, but then again so are many political speeches.

Dennis Fitzgerald
Melbourne, Australia

EU citizens living in the UK can vote

I am a European/Australian citizen living and working in the UK since 2016. I voted in the 2016 general election, and I had only been in the country for a few months.

Even without British citizenship, EU citizens living in the UK have so far had the right to vote! How many like Francisco Hernandez Olaya (Letters 25 September) didn’t know they could register on the electoral roll?

Maybe you should retake that “living in the UK” test Olaya?

Name supplied
Address supplied

Bodyguard and islamophobia

Your home affairs correspondent has written an article inspired by the BBC’s recent hit drama Bodyguard to warn “Bodyguard’s Nadia shows the danger of underestimating female jihadis”.

Bodyguard is a drama. It is made up. This is as opposed to reality – what people actually experience in the world.

In August, after Boris Johnson described Muslim women dressed in burqas as “letterboxes”, the monitoring group TellMAMA recorded a four-fold increase in racist abuse, harassment and threats of violence towards Muslim women wearing hijabs or niqabs.

That is the daily reality Muslim women experience in the UK.

They are the primary victims of Islamophobia. That Islamophobia has been fed by the media – be it in dramas like Bodyguard or in articles like Lizzie Dearden’s – on a daily basis.

Sasha Simic
London, N16