Blunkett is right – Britain still wants Brexit

SIR – Having been a Conservative candidate for Sheffield City council in the early Eighties, I never thought I would agree with Lord Blunkett – until I read his erudite piece (“A second referendum would still vote to leave”, Comment, August 5). Simon Briggs

Sheffield, South Yorkshire

SIR – I think Lord Blunkett is mistaken in his assertion that a second Brexit referendum would produce a second vote to leave.

There is strong anecdotal evidence to suggest that the majority of those who voted for Brexit in the first referendum were everyday folk who wanted British workers to have the first chance at British jobs, and for the British taxpayer to be relieved of the burden of supporting unemployed EU citizens. They wanted all foreign citizens to apply for visas to work here in the usual way. They were not particularly interested in trade deals or customs duties.

Now that the Government has declared its intention to award citizenship to three and a half million European migrants, those voters can only feel betrayed and would, I believe, be disinclined to vote in any second referendum. Jeffrey Pearson

Heswall, Wirral

SIR – Lord Blunkett states that “the people had, quite frankly, had enough”. He mentions the financial meltdown in 2008/9, austerity measures and “a political system that did not reflect their concerns”.

Yet he conveniently misses out one of the key reasons why the people had “had enough”: his own government’s decision in 2004 to open the doors to people from the A8 countries of central and Eastern Europe, in what has been described as the largest expansion in the history of EU integration.

We are a tolerant nation, but too many people have arrived too quickly, without an accompanying strategy for assimilation.