Membership of the EU has led to an increasing of UK’S national debt

REV Dr John Cameron (Write Back, December 13) resorts to insulting Brexiteers by likening their sovereignty to patriotism when he quotes Samuel Johnson, who said that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”. Brexiteers have no intellectual, fact-based argument other than sovereignty, he claims.

Remainers are not called scoundrels, but are “honest brokers”, prepared to abandon sovereignty for the continuance of the prolonged economic prosperity and stability for which the EU and its tariff-free single market are chiefly responsible. To abandon this market is economic suicide. This is about as factual as the tooth-fairy.

The one fact-based argument that Rev Cameron and other Remainers choose to conceal, or ignore, is the telling blow that explodes their myth of the UK’S “prolonged economic prosperity”.

It is this: for well over 15 years, the national debt has been escalating, year by year. Even pre-covid-19, our debt was on track to overwhelm Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Debt exceeding GDP means bankruptcy.

Remainers insist that our mythical state of prolonged economic prosperity is chiefly due to our membership of the EU. Thus, remaining is vital. It follows, then, in the real world, that EU membership must be the chief cause of our rocketing national debt, too.

I challenge Rev Dr Cameron and Alban Maginness (Comment, December 16) to explain how remaining on a course, tried, tested and proven over 15 years to drive up our national debt, is to our economic advantage.

Perhaps if Alban and Rev Dr Cameron would spend less time insulting and name-calling Brexiteers, they could, instead, consult the reliable facts re national debt, readily available from the Office for National Statistics.

Better the uncertainty of a hard Brexit than the established certainty of remaining and the dangerous continuing escalation of our debt.