The tribalism in our society may be what is holding it together

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The EU has been our tribe for more than half a century (AFP/Getty)

The tribalism that Patrick Gilbert has referred to in his article is what I myself have been afraid we may descend into, due to the painfully divisive actions of this government. It seems the prime minister now is basically a hopeless pied piper leading us deep into the mountain, apparently hell-bent on self-destruction.

The word “tribalism” suggests in a lot of people’s minds a step backward from civilisation. Certainly, I think, that was the sense in which the Queen meant it in her speech at Christmas.

But, in another sense, as a concept, it is no bad thing – people gathering together in communities and collaborating with each other, and making sure they are kept safe from other tribes who might want to inflict terrible woe on them.

The gathering together of various disparate tribes into organisations we now call nations or federations is surely the definition of “civilisation”?

And now our government wants us to break away from the federation which has united all of us, for more than half a century, after the previous few hundred years of ridiculous wars.

To my mind this is not civilised behaviour, and the people indulging in it are, therefore, not civilised themselves.

Chris Bonfield
Address supplied

Why the big deal over no deal?

I was 28 when Edward Heath signed up to the Treaty of Rome leading to the EEC and subsequently the EU. For almost the first three decades of my life, therefore, I lived in a no-deal situation. Yet by that time I had worked for nine years in a city shipping and forwarding agents, exporting goods to every part of the world (without help of trade deals between countries).

I had made my first visit abroad – with a theatre company to a European country, the Netherlands, for a week’s tour of Twelfth Night. I had completed three years of teacher training, and when we entered the European Economic Community, I was installed at a school in the bush of northern Zambia beginning a three-year contract as an English teacher. How on earth did I survive living a no-deal life?

Edward Thomas
Eastbourne

It’s time for Theresa May to take responsibility

Michael Gove was devastatingly correct when he said Jeremy Corbyn is about the worst possible leader to lead the Labour Party. But now Gove needs to accept that Theresa May is also about the worst possible person to lead the Conservative Party.

Surely historians will label this stubborn and foolish woman the Betrayer of Britannia – a democratic vote by the public more than two years ago instructed the ruling elite that they clearly wanted to leave the EU. So why is Theresa May now pursuing her “deal” which nobody voted for?

It is shameful that she blames both parliament and the EU for not fully supporting “her deal” – indeed, she should take on board that it is only a weak, inept and shameless captain that blames the crew when the ship strikes an iceberg.

Dave Haskell
Cardigan

A people’s vote is the only democratic option

Well done for all your efforts in bringing a second referendum closer and closer. As I listen to, watch or read about debate on the issue I am consistently irritated by the assertion that 52 per cent of the population voted for Brexit.

As I have previously highlighted and, as you have from time to time repeated, only 37 per cent of the electorate voted for Brexit. The rights of the other 63 per cent need to be defended, particularly as a significant number of those who voted have likely since died and an equal number attained voting age. To assert that another referendum is undemocratic is tantamount to saying a new vote is unfair, as those who have died can no longer vote.

Your efforts now should be to debunk Theresa May’s claim that a new referendum would take 13 months to organise. If a general election with numerous manifestos and campaigns to organise can be achieved in six weeks, it is an affront to suggest that a single-issue referendum has to take any longer.

Andrew Erskine
Abergavenny

Facts seem to no longer matter in today’s politics

Boris Johnson seems to be taking a Trumpian approach to politics and the media – lie and deny you ever said something. Both know that statements are fact-checked these days, but seem not to care. We are in a new and disturbing time in politics.

JR
Birmingham

Does anything really change?

Our politicians “are but weasels fighting in a hole”. And “there lurches past, his great eyes without thought / Under the shadow of stupid straw pale locks / That insolent fiend Robert Artisson”.

These are the words of WB Yeats a century ago in the Irish Civil War, in his poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”.

Oswyn Murray
Banbury