Keir Starmer has got it completely wrong on Brexit

Letters to the editor: our readers share their views. Please send your letters to letters@independent.co.uk

Now is the time to attack Brexit, not bow to it as the Labour leader is doing (Getty)

Brexit is causing enormous damage to the country and the two unworthy candidates for PM are in denial about it. Brexit is clearly responsible for the delays at Dover. The UK demanded that all passports be stamped at borders. This takes a few minutes per car, whereas waving through a vehicle took only a second.

The recession is due to the labour force being under strength. There are around 1.5 million job vacancies, mostly due to Brexit and this country being difficult to enter, as well as unattractive. All of this because we were persuaded, by the discredited PM of the time, to vote Brexit. It was the will of Johnson not the people.

Then there is the ludicrous desire to get rid of all laws that have a hint of Europe about them. We will scrap workers rights, much of health and safety, and build to our standards and not those of our customers! This will obviously diminish sales. It is adding more damage to the great self-harm of Brexit.

Now is the time to attack Brexit, not bow to it as Keir Starmer is doing. Several industries desperately need nationalisation, but again, Starmer is set against this. Clearly energy must be nationalised and this Tory government with its “handouts” are dodging more control. Water feeds foreign ownership with its profits and is not planning for the future needed for reservoirs. The trains are in a mess trying to provide profits to many owners.

We need change but clearly, nobody is prepared to bite the bullet.

Robert Murray

Nottingham

Private health service

As Professor Liz Kay points out, governments have effectively privatised optical services, and dentistry is already following close on its heels. To that we should probably add chiropody.

Chronic underfunding would now seem to be the way in which health will also become a mainly private service. We already have large parts of NHS provision contracted out to independent providers, and more people who can afford it paying for operations themselves or via private insurance.

G Forward

Stirling

Gordon Brown is not the answer

So Gordon Brown – the man who despite inheriting a healthy economy left the country with a trillion pound debt and widened the existing wealth inequality – thinks he’s the right person to be advising on the cost of living crisis.

It’s like Margaret Thatcher advising on the value of trade unions or Tony Blair on the need for the PM to be honest to parliament. You would be more likely to get better advice from Mrs Brown than the man who made sure Labour lost power.

Richard Whiteside

Halifax

Political engagement

David Nelmes wrote with obvious dismay in Monday’s letters about the dogma-driven policies coming from the Tory leadership candidates and promised that the wider electorate would be making their notes.

Sadly, I think he is wrong. The wider electorate pays little attention to politics and sees it as something that happens on another planet. Occasionally like a herd they lurch and rumble, but mostly they graze.

I had a parcel delivered one afternoon a few weeks ago and the driver asked what I was doing with my time. I told him that the day had suddenly become more interesting as Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak had resigned. “Who?” he asked politely.

Richard Warrell

Yealmpton, Devon

Refusing to act

The prime minister says he cannot do anything about the various crises we are suffering this summer. He says it’s for his successor.

Is he still drawing his prime ministerial salary, and if so, why?

Kathryn Salomon

London

No 10 has ruled out Boris Johnson introducing immediate measures to help people with rising energy costs. He’s leaving such matters to his successor.

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This situation reminds me of the old saying: “Nero (Boris Johnson) fiddled while Rome (the UK) burned.”

To so many of us common people, our Tory government appears to be more concerned about their own power, privileges, pleasures and wellbeing than the future of the population at large, many of whom hardly earn enough to both feed their families and heat their homes, let alone pay any taxes. And so many of those struggling people are employed in essential services.

Where would our prime minister be without those who worked tirelessly to save his life when he was in intensive care?

Tony Shephard

Shifnal