We must keep a customs union to avoid a hard border in Ireland

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

Michel Barnier has urged against a hard border post Brexit

It’s a bit hypocritical of Theresa May and Arlene Foster to complain about the EU draft agreement over Ireland when it’s simply a legal contract they’ve already verbally agreed to, namely that until a hitherto unknown solution is found to prevent a hard border with Ireland, regulatory alignment – the single market – must continue. It’s unfortunate and perhaps not well known that the ageing, hard Brexiteers don’t care about peace in Northern Ireland, nor about the wishes of Scotland and Wales. They strive for a mythical, golden yesteryear of English colonialism. They are out of touch and should be out of Government.

Stefan Wickenham
Oxted, Surrey

To help keep us in a customs union, the best way to calm this maelstrom, Brussels should allow significant British input into the negotiating of trade deals, even though we would not have a vote in the Council of Ministers. That might be enough to allow Theresa May to prise her party out of its self-destructive holding pattern, and get the deal that we need on a customs union.

John Gemmell
Wem, Shropshire

A perfectly workable solution to a so-called frictionless, tariff-free, and soft border between Northern Ireland and the Republic is a customs union. Why is nobody proposing that the Republic of Ireland should follow UK regulations? That avoids all the objections of Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney, whilst retaining the territorial integrity of the UK, thus keeping the unionists happy.

David Fisher
Manchester

GPs profiting from patient pain is nothing new

It would be a mistake to think that GPs profiting from not referring patients was a new risk.

The same “moral hazard” was implicit in the now defunct Tory fundholding process a quarter of a century ago. The problem was magnified in small practices or small fundholding consortia where risk pooling could not effectively take place and one extra coronary artery bypass graft, for example, could derail a whole year’s budgeting efforts.

The present Government’s ambition is to privatise healthcare which will, amongst other things, enforce profit-making as a standard feature of healthcare in the UK. As a nation we have sunk very low under successive Tory onslaughts in the last few decades but consigning the sick, injured, suffering and dying to the market marks the full flowering of the asocial, amoral, seedy barbarianism that the Tories exult in.

Steve Ford
Haydon Bridge

Regarding GP rewards: ask Kenneth Clarke how long this has been going on and he will tell you. Since he invented fundholding in the early Nineties.

Paul Sheldon
Address supplied

Paying doctors extra not to treat patients will undoubtedly save money for the NHS.

Even greater efficiency and further cost-saving could be achieved by cutting out the middleman and paying patients directly to go home and die.

John Doherty
Stratford-upon-Avon

NRA boycott can happen in the UK, too

I read with great interest David Usborne’s article on the NRA boycott in the US, but shouldn’t we Brits continue the good work in the UK?

If someone would poll large UK companies working on behalf of US companies and subsidiaries of US companies working in the UK on their stance as to better gun control and if they support the NRA philosophy then we could make informed decisions as to what we buy from whom.

Let’s keep the pressure on the NRA and perhaps the people can make a change where government has failed.

Keith Pole
Basingstoke

Silly weather-related nonsense

Here are the things about weather forecasts that make me very grumpy:

Saying cold “snap”. Why not a period of cold weather? Or a cold spell?

Clouds “bubbling up”. Since when did they start doing this, instead of forming or gathering, or just increasing?

“Spits and spots of rain.” Eh?

Any mention of wrapping up warm, or using an umbrella, or even worse, a “brolly”.

Penny Little
Great Haseley