Opposition calls for a soft Brexit only make no deal at all more likely

SIR – The opposition parties accuse Theresa May of opting for a so-called hard Brexit as her ultimate choice. They ignore her need to use the threat of a hard Brexit in order to win concessions from the EU.

To set your sights on a so-called soft Brexit would only encourage the EU to make no concessions at all. The more the opposition parties fail to back Mrs May in this, the more likely Britain will end up without a deal of any sort. That is hardly what the opposition parties and Remainers, let alone the rest of the British electorate, want. Major David Riddick (retd) Cranbrook, Kent SIR – “Senior Whitehall sources” (report, April 26) say that Britain will have to pay billions into the EU budget. Yet Article 50 says nothing about an exit bill. The £50 billion demand was invented by the European Commission to solve a critical EU budget problem. Losing the British contribution will leave a large hole.

Government legal advisers say we owe the EU nothing. A major concession at the start of negotiations would signal to EU leaders that they can walk all over us. Ken Worthy Esher, Surrey SIR – You report Sir Keir Starmer as saying that Labour would “not accept ‘no deal’ as a viable option”. This implies that Labour would accept whatever “deal” the EU negotiators had decided to impose on Britain. This in turn is an inducement to these negotiators to impose a settlement probably quite unacceptable to the majority who voted to leave last year. Not a very clever approach to negotiations. Dugald Barr London W8 SIR – British Remainers often complain that fair attention should be paid to the views of the losing 48 per cent in the EU referendum. The number of votes for anti-EU parties in the first round of the presidential French elections exceeded this percentage, very narrowly falling short of a majority.

How, then, should Emmanuel Macron, if he wins on Sunday week, accommodate the views of such a sizeable minority, rather than simply press ahead on a ticket of “hard EU”? Quentin Skinner Hopfgarten im Brixental, Tyrol, Austria SIR – Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, talks about the “march of history”, and seems to think that the EU is somehow in step with it. Actually, no such march exists.

Some historical events appear to follow a pattern; many others do not, as was shown conclusively by Isaiah Berlin 70 years ago in his short demolition of historical inevitability. Later, he adopted another more convincing historical theory that “from the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight was ever fashioned” – especially, perhaps, the EU. John Jolliffe Mells, Somerset