Saving my country from Brexit chancers

“WHEN the facts change I change my mind” quoth John Maynard Keynes. David Sage (WM Letters, August 22) may wish to reflect on that and the fact that increasing numbers of us are changing our minds over Brexit.

The facts available to the public on the consequences of no deal have changed considerably over the past two years. The “facts” of Theresa May’s Chequers proposal (already dead in the water on both sides of the Channel) remain obscure; ask people in financial services.

He invites Remainers to accept the result of “a free and open referendum” when we know the Leave campaign has been fined for overspending and the Electoral Commission is investigating the possibility of further breaches of the law.

That “we have been denied sensible negotiation” is nobody’s fault but our own. The EU has always known what it wants from the negotiations. It is only within the last month that we have come up with a negotiating position, two years after the referendum and with only eight months to go. This is due to May’s gung-ho determination to trigger Article 50 in advance of reaching a negotiating position against the advice of Sir Ivan Rogers, Permanent Representative of the UK to the EU until his resignation over the issue in January 2017.

Call me disingenuous if you like but I regard myself as enough of a patriot to know that my duty lies in doing whatever I can to save my country from the bunch of chancers, Boris Johnson MP “primus inter pares”, who got us into this mess. Last summer Liam Fox MP told us that to negotiate post-Brexit free trade with the EU should be the “easiest in human history”. Now he’s calling 60/40 odds on a hard Brexit. To quote another, David Davis MP (now what did he do to support Theresa May’s negotiating position?) observed during the campaign: “A democracy which cannot change its mind is not a democracy.”

A second vote is the only route by which we can undo the folly we visited upon ourselves two years ago, and there’s nothing disingenuous about it.

Robin Lynn Sully, Vale of Glamorgan