Letter about Brexit does not add up in my opinion

I read Shyfox’s bizarre letter (published 29th November) with some amusement. I assume it was an attempt by Shyfox to appear well read and educated unlike us Brexiteers who are so obviously of limited intellect.

There is no doubt that the difference between the UK and continental legal and political systems have developed from different philosophies, and I agree the UK philosophers to which Shyfox refers were more pragmatic and less idealistic than their continental counterparts, but I totally lose his/her thread thereafter. He/she seems to claim on the one hand that this more pragmatic approach led to the UK becoming the world’s leading nation in terms of science and industry and gave British people greater freedoms than those in Europe. On the other hand, Shyfox says it gave us a ‘legal “system” [that] is a joke’ because it allows decisions of courts of first instance to be appealed! I would remind Shyfox that the duty of care a manufacturer owes to the end user of its products developed through the decisions of the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords, or Supreme court as we now must refer to it, and that continental systems of codified law have been very much modelled on those decisions.

Where though Shyfox really loses me is in his/her assessment of how this is affecting the Brexit negotiations. If Mrs May and David Davis (both of whom incidentally were grammar school and not public school educated) are, as Shyfox suggests, taking a pragmatic approach to the negotiations but getting ‘fobbed off’ by their EU counterparts, why does that make Mrs May and Mr Davis ‘ignoramuses and not up to it’? Would not such an accusation would be more appropriately targeted at the EU’s less pragmatic negotiators who are doing the ‘fobbing off’?

John Knights