Letters: EU threats to withhold Britain’s rebate demand a strong response

SIR – I voted to leave the EU. To me, that meant returning to the way Britain was governed before joining.

The possibility that this country will still be subject to the European Court of Justice, discussed by Charles Moore, appals me.

Here we are, nearly one and a half years after the Brexit vote, and our leaders are still being subservient to the EU.

It appears that many of our representatives, while paying lip‑service to the vote, are gradually watering down what the result means, stretching out the leaving process and granting concessions little by little in the hope that no one will notice.

Someone with backbone is needed to tell the EU that enough is enough. David Davis was rejected as a leader of the Conservative Party a few years ago and is certainly proving not to be the man to drive our exit.

Geoffrey Robinson
Newport, Pembrokeshire

SIR – I wish I could believe the letter (November 16) written by several of my colleagues who are threatening to vote against setting a date on Brexit.

Their argument is that such a move would make last-minute negotiations unachievable.

It is clear to me that two parties who wish to negotiate constructively could easily have something in place by the end of March 2019. It is also clear to me that the current negotiations are totally one-sided, with EU intransigence making any meaningful progress almost impossible.

The EU does not want us to leave. Uncertainty (a word used constantly by those who want us to remain) is the best weapon it has to create division.

We voted to leave the EU in its entirety. To claim otherwise is being disingenuous. Yes, there are legal points to be examined while we debate the EU Withdrawal Bill, but the nature of many of the amendments laid before the Commons would indicate another purpose entirely.

Richard Drax MP (Con)
London SW1

Budget fears

SIR – Hope and vision are indeed what we need from Philip Hammond’s Budget.

Unfortunately, we will not get them. Mr Hammond and Theresa May are of the “socialism lite” persuasion, and will continue in their belief that government is good until the Conservatives lose the next election.

The only hope is if the party acts quickly and installs a visionary leader.

Phil Drewett
Torquay, Devon

SIR – Robert Frazer (Letters, November 15) is right to condemn the Conservatives for failing to provide a robust challenge to Labour’s proposals on railway renationalisation.

I am a daily commuter on the East Coast Main Line between Peterborough and King’s Cross. Any delays that we experience are almost invariably the result of overrunning engineering works or the failure of overhead lines, signals and points. In other words, it’s the part of the service still run by the state that lets us down.

Mrs May claims to favour the free market, yet the Government fails to draw on and highlight the huge volume of analysis and evidence available from many commentators and think tanks to support its case.

Geoff Booth
Lyndon, Rutland

Better than tax discs

SIR – Recent letters have discussed the rise in car tax-dodging since the scrapping of paper discs.

Maybe we should follow the example of Germany, where number plates can only be obtained when the owner has insurance and a valid MOT (TÜV) and has paid tax.

The plates do not remain with the car and must be renewed when a car is sold to a new owner.

Increasing tax on fuel, suggested by David Barnett (Letters, November 18) as an alternative to vehicle excise duty, would penalise classic car owners.

Colin A Cormac
Lingfield, Surrey

SIR – A few years ago, my car was stolen, cloned and sold on. It was only when the new owner tried to re-tax the car at the post office that it was noticed that the same registration number was already taxed elsewhere.

How will “clever” technology spot a cloned car? Surely police cameras will simply register it as taxed and insured (assuming, of course, that the owner of the genuine car is honest and diligent in taxing and insuring his car).

A simple tax disc, on the other hand, is an obvious indicator to even the average person on the street, as well as traffic wardens and patrolling police.

Patrick Long
South Wigston, Leicestershire

SIR – As a young PC on the streets of west London in the mid-Sixties, I asked an older officer why he was so interested in tax discs.

“Laddy,” he growled in his broad Glaswegian accent, “failure to display a road fund licence conceals a whole multitude of sins.”

Iain Gordon
Banstead, Surrey

Aid and defence

SIR – Penny Mordaunt, Secretary of State for International Development, thinks that aid will “head off trouble” and that we have “world-class defence and diplomacy”.

If we pay aid to buy influence, the begging bowl will be held out for as long as it takes for us to come to our senses. It is also beyond all reason that we should be giving away money that we have had to borrow.

As for world-class defence, Ms Mordaunt, as a Royal Naval reservist, should know that our defences have been hollowed out. Sir Michael Fallon boasted about the size of our budget, but failed to admit that it only reached 2 per cent of GDP through including many non-defence items.

The Navy has just 19 escort vessels, which would be insufficient to protect our major warships, even if they all worked. The six Type 45 destroyers are virtually useless, while many of the 13 Type 23 frigates are laid up.

We may have the largest aircraft carrier the Royal Navy has ever had, but where are the aircraft? Will there be enough for both the Fleet Air Arm and the Royal Air Force?

As for the Army, the target of 30,000 reservists remains out of reach; but we have overshot on the reduction in regular manpower to 86,000, and it is doubtful if we will ever get as many personnel as that.

We need to boost recruitment, but before we can do that, retention of trained personnel has to be given priority. The most effective recruiting mechanisms are serving personnel with good morale.

Let’s abandon the aid budget except for emergency aid, and save further money by getting rid of the Department for Overseas Development.

David Wragg
Edinburgh

What Gladstone said about the slave trade

SIR – You report on the attempts by students at Liverpool University to remove the name of William Gladstone from a building, on the grounds that he “benefited from slavery”.

Gladstone found himself in a difficult position on this subject. His father’s family had made its fortune on the back of slavery in the West Indies. On June 3 1833, Gladstone gave his maiden speech in the House of Commons, speaking about a Bill to emancipate slaves in the Empire. John Gladstone – William’s father – was criticised in Parliament for the alleged mistreatment of his slaves.

William would not deny that dreadful treatment of slaves occurred on plantations, but argued that his father was innocent. He would not, he said, defend slavery as an institution. It was a system that “unquestionably began in crime, in atrocious crime… but I do not admit that holding slaves necessarily involves sin, though it does necessarily involve the deepest and heaviest responsibility”. (He meant, I think, that if you had slaves, you had a responsibility to treat them well.)

He said that, while he would welcome gradual emancipation, he thought that unconditional emancipation before the slaves were ripe for freedom would be “ruinous to the colonies, to the country and to the slaves”. This was a case, I think, of a son defending his father.

His attitude to slavery can be judged, perhaps, by his intervention in a debate about imported sugar from Brazil in 1841, grown by slaves. He said he could not be party to encouraging that “monster”, the slave trade – “while war, pestilence and famine, slay their thousands, [slavery] from year to year… slays its tens of thousands”.

I have taken these details from Gladstone by Philip Magnus, which is recognised as a very sound biography.

John de Waal
Eastbourne, East Sussex

Lessons from the past in parcel delivery

SIR – It has recently been reported that there are plans for London buses to be used to transport Amazon parcels, as part of an effort to boost revenue in the face of falling passenger numbers.

This reminded me of something that was quite customary during the Fifties, when I was growing up on my parents’ farm some 10 miles west of Salisbury. Whenever my mother ordered fish from the Salisbury fishmonger, it would be carefully wrapped in newspaper and string and transported to the Bell Inn in Steeple Langford via the Salisbury-Warminster bus. Sometimes I would walk down to the inn with my mother to collect it.

It occurred to me that this plan for London buses might be adapted as a way of saving rural communities from losing vital bus routes, not to mention pubs.

Miranda McCormick
London SW1

Slice of life?

SIR – Not only did Aunt Juley in the BBC’s Howards End display the most appalling table manners by spreading jam on her toast when it was in her hand (Letters, November 18) – but it was also sliced bread.

Surely that did not exist at the time.

Charlotte Barker
Tetbury, Gloucestershire

Thumbs down

SIR – Where have all the hitchhikers gone?

James Farrington
Hartfield, East Sussex

Telling tales

SIR – Michael Deacon is bemused by the stories his son has been telling nursery school staff about his home life.

When my son started school, his headmistress made a pact with the parents. “If you don’t believe everything they say about us,” she pledged, “we won’t believe everything they say about you.”

Geraldine Durrant
East Grinstead, West Sussex