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Vince Cable is right that older people voted nostalgically over Brexit

Please send your letters to letters@independent.co.uk

Tuesday 13 March 2018 17:24 GMT
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The Liberal Democrat leader recently said that many older people who voted Leave longed for a world where 'faces were white'
The Liberal Democrat leader recently said that many older people who voted Leave longed for a world where 'faces were white'

Of course Vince Cable is right. There remains a large reservoir of passive racism in England, which we still hardly dare talk about. It is not often openly articulated, but is deeply embedded in ways which individuals often cannot recognise in themselves: the “I am not racist but...” syndrome.

It affects both older blue collar workers, and particularly the elderly middle classes (of whom I am one) and who voted in such significant numbers for Brexit. The same groups do indeed still have a deep nostalgia for the empire and Britain’s past “glories” with only the sketchiest notion of how exploitative we were in so many ways in our heyday.

I am afraid that the Brexit voters did vote for all of us to be not just poorer, but much poorer, because so few had any detailed understanding of what would follow a vote to leave. And why should they? They weren’t properly briefed on the complex ramifications of leaving the EU.

Who had thought of the practical difficulties of the Irish border, for medical transplants, horse racing, or the implications for a whole range of key industries reliant on just-in-time manufacturing techniques? And those are just some issues picked at random.

What they were warned about, and what the Brexiteers laughed off as Project Fear, was the huge loss to the Treasury’s tax take when manufacturing and service industries (especially financial services) and trade decline significantly. Then there will be less, certainly not more, government funds to be spent on the NHS, social care, education or whatever.

Let us hope that young activists in organisations like Open Britain will manage before it is too late to open the general public’s eyes and awaken our somnolent MPs before we take this disastrous step.

Gavin Turner
Norfolk

Wait, the Lib Dems are having a conference?

I agree with M Wydall’s comments (Letters) about the content of Vince Cable’s speech, but feel he (Vince Cable) needed to make a speech that ran the risk of being reported. This was the only report I have seen about the Lib Dems recently – I didn’t even know they were in conference at the moment.

Derek Thornhill
Gloucestershire

We’re all losing our pensions, it’s just the way things are

It’s curious why university teachers think they should be exempt from the pressures on all pension arrangements to, at least through a transition process, move from defined benefit to contribution schemes. This has already happened in (most of) the private sector (I would be interested to see an article researching that).

It’s a fact of life that with people living longer and workforce shrinking, pension funds cannot maintain the old scheme. And at the same time, there are clear signals that the “service” provided by teachers is often not “value for money” of the constantly increasing fees in England.

Evidence in my experience is that contact time with lecturers has reduced significantly, expecting students to use the internet more for self-study. I suspect sympathy for their cause is rather slim.

Scott Peacock
Address supplied

Brexit outcomes

So Philip Hammond continues to maintain the (unlikely?) claim that the Treasury has modelled lots of Brexit outcomes, but NOT the Government’s preferred option. Why not? And if they haven’t modelled it how do they know that it is the preferred option? Or are they not interested in the economic outcome – just the political one?

PJ Johnston
Hexham

There’s a hint of hypocrisy in our outrage at Russia

If it is proven beyond reasonable doubt that the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal and his daughter was carried out by the Russian government on British soil then it is an appalling outrage.

But what’s amazing is depending on how much people in the Tory party scream (Boris Johnson) how right can become wrong and wrong becomes right. After all we are talking about the possibility of a state-sanctioned execution.

In 2014 British “Reaper” drones flown by remote control assassinated 305 people including a number of British citizens. OK, many of these people were Isis or al-Qaeda and there’s an argument that goes these guys deserved it, but we as a nation still killed them.

So whatever happened to the rule of law and the presumption of innocence particularly given that we like to present ourselves as a law-abiding nation that is supposedly far superior morally than Russia?

And might we reflect before we sabre-rattle any more that Russia was our ally during the Second World War and that these brave and heroic people lost a minimum of 25 million-30 million fighting Hitler’s fascist hordes? The Russians paid a terrible price which neither we nor the world has ever truly thanked them for.

And we ought to remember that not very long ago it was these “big bad” Russians that twice offered the West to get rid of all its nuclear weapons if we did too. Why are we so determined to have such bad relations with them?

Mark Holt
Liverpool

Jamie Carragher should be ashamed of himself

I find myself truly disgusted over the spitting incident the other day. No civilised person should ever do such a thing. Provocation is irrelevant. Jamie Carragher, the Sky Sport pundit, should, I feel, have already resigned from his well-paid job.

We are talking about an individual who football-supporting children look up to! I think the message could, only too clearly, lead to such behaviour being seen elsewhere.

I hope he really is totally ashamed of himself and if Sky continue as his employer, so should they be.

Robert Boston
Kingshill

The advantages of being sacked by Trump

According to the encyclopaedia of political life that is “Yes Minister” and “Yes Prime Minister”, the letters “JB,” (jailed by the British) were virtually essential to have on the CV of any aspiring leader, especially in one of our ex-colonies. It seems to me that the letters “ST” (sacked by Trump) are achieving a similar cachet amongst American politicians.

David Hill
Elsenham

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