How on earth have we descended into chaos?

IS Windsor Davies (“What would second vote actually achieve?” WM letters, October 24) afraid that a second vote would reverse the referendum result so narrowly determined by the delusions of Tory Brexiteers and the billionaires who stand to gain financially from their investment in the Leave campaign?

Democracy is an ongoing process, not a single vote in a single moment of time on a simplistic binary choice determined by a narrow majority for all time, which is why we can change our minds in general elections.

Before the undemocratic Five Year Parliament Act, this failed minority government would have been turfed out by a vote of no confidence leading to a general election.

Instead they cling on by making a tyranny of Brexit through their one-and-a- half-billion-pound bribe to the DUP when Northern Ireland voted Remain. How can that be called democracy when it’s a travesty of parliamentary democracy?

Despite her Chancellor’s warnings that people didn’t vote to make themselves poorer, Mrs May bound herself to her hard Brexiteers with her Lancaster House “Red Lines” when such a narrow margin for Leave requires a soft Brexit that would not destroy the jobs and living standards of voters hardest hit by austerity who voted to leave the EU. All of us who have struggled to house, feed and clothe a family know that being made poorer does not enable you to “take back control”.

It is only the illiberal wealthy elite who stand to gain from deregulation of standards, from keeping their tax havens that might be under future threat from the EU, and from increased arms spending necessitated by isolation from our European partners.

Although 63% of voters did not vote for Brexit we have no voice in parliament from a leader of the opposition who seems unwilling and incapable of speaking for us despite facing the open goal of an incompetent minority government blundering ever closer to the catastrophe of a no-deal Brexit.

How on earth has “the mother of parliaments” come to this shameful spectacle? Margaret Phelps Penarth