How the Today programme should change its tactics if it wants to win back listeners

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

John Humphrys, one of the presenters of the Today programme (Rex)

Leaving aside content, I have one or two ideas as to why the Today programme is losing listeners…

Interviewees (especially politicians) frequently do not answer questions and despite the much-vaunted forensic approach are not pressed.

The presenters (especially Humphrys and Robinson) ask such long questions one loses the will to carry on and when the interviewee is finally allowed in they interrupt so much as to make the whole process impossible to listen to. I suppose what they really want is to have the whole three hours to themselves.

I would not say these things of the whole “team” but Humphrys and Robinson should go.

Anthony Ingleton
Sheffield

One reason for the Today programme losing 800,000 listeners must be the tedious and irritating repetition of the news every 15 minutes.

Andrew Sutton
Midhurst​

How can anyone know what other people’s reasons for voting were?

Naomi Firsht says she felt a “kind of giddy excitement” on 24 June 2016. I felt a sense of disbelief, loss and despair.

She also says: “Despite constantly being told we didn’t know what we voted for, most Brexit voters are clear that they voted to leave the EU entirely…”

First, how does she know what most Brexit voters wanted? Presumably she thinks they are all like her. Really? Is she anti-immigration? That seems to me to have been the overwhelmingly nasty aspect of Brexit, and I’d like to hear her defend with any credibility all those Leavers whom she apparently knows so well against charges of xenophobia.

Second, does she want our employment rights, our human rights (and what is so awful about the ECJ?), our farming and fishing subsidies, our research funding, our exchange of security information, our freedom of movement, our healthcare agreements, etc, to be trashed? Does she want our animal welfare and food standards to be dictated by the backward US rather than the more progressive EU?

Does she not want us to engage with the EU and have a say (should we have any decent MEPs, rather than the self-serving Farage) rather than desperately try to please the rest of the world because we were once an empire but actually are, as ever, a rather small island? Does she not see the advantages of the EU trading bloc? If only we had been a fully engaged EU member rather than a truculent teenager sitting on the sidelines.

And who is bullying? The EU? Hardly. May said, before negotiations had even started, that she would be “a bloody difficult woman” and that “no deal was better than a bad deal”. That is not the way to conduct a negotiation, particularly when it is 27 v 1.

Does Naomi Firsht not want a united rather than a divided Europe?

I have no idea what Leavers voted for but I do believe their reasons were disparate. To attempt to present them as united, as Naomi Firsht does, is perverse. Then, to claim, as she also does, that it is “the Brexit voters who will lose out most” is plain annoying. I still feel a great sense of loss and despair at the outcome of the ill conceived, ill designed, ill debated referendum.

So, Naomi Firsht, what was it you, and all those Leavers you know so well, actually wanted?

Beryl Wall
London W4

What bullying and threats?

I wonder if Naomi Firsht could perhaps enlighten us with some examples of the way that the EU are bullying and threatening our gallant negotiators because as far as I can tell they laid out their position from the start and haven’t changed it? If all the wonderful concessions that the Brexiteers promised haven’t been forthcoming then I hardly think that’s the fault of those “beastly foreigners”.

Similarly it seems to me the only blustering threats have come from “our” side rather than Europe.

Firsht might also like to consider the recent offer to the UK that halting the process would allow us to rejoin under our existing terms, but perhaps that is another inconvenient truth.

S Lawrence
Enfield, London

I see that Naomi Firsht has included no example of the “threats and bullying tactics” of EU officials. I wonder what they are.

Patrick Harty
Kingswood​

Brexit wasn’t even about Brexit

Naomi Firsht (I have never regretted voting Leave) is to be felicitated for putting her head over the parapet in such a Remain environment.

I wonder if she has understood that the referendum was never about what was best for the UK – it was always a mechanism for attempting to keep the Tory party together. Hence the phrase employed by a senior Eurocrat at the time: “a catfight in the Tory party”.

“What you have to realise about the Conservative Party is that it is a coalition of privileged interests. Its main purpose is to defend that privilege. And the way it wins elections is by giving just enough to just enough other people.” A sentiment alleged to have been aired by a senior Conservative at a private Tory function.

Naomi and all other Leavers can be given categorical assurance that her welfare or preferences never really mattered in the first place – it was only ever about maintaining the elite’s dominance.

Had the referendum been about what was best for the UK it would have arisen after a cross-party consensus and due parliamentary process.

Insofar as there is now a choice about ways forward, it is between rock hard Brexit or no Brexit. All other bets seem to be off.

Steve Ford
Haydon Bridge

A second referendum for ‘The will of the people’

Theresa May is forever using the phrase, “The will of the people”. Why not use this as ammunition for your campaign?

Why is she totally against finding out the will of the people now? Does she think the people’s will may have changed and she doesn’t want to know? It seems that she is trying to implement the will of Theresa May.

She should have the courage to find out the will of the people now, as it might have changed since 2016. If it hasn’t, then all well and good. However, if the will of the people has changed, a final vote is the only way of finding out.

In short, make “Implementing the will of the people” your slogan.

…and suggest that having a final vote is the only way of finding out what the will of the people actually is.

Mike Alexander
Address supplied

Final Say referendum voting suggestion

Regarding your call for a second referendum, which I have supported, I suggest the voting be structured as follows, to reflect the impact of the result on our lives:

16-39-year-olds – 3 votes

40-64-year-olds – 2 votes

65-year-olds and over – 1 vote

Marcus Cleaver (1 vote)
Malvern