SIR – Mr Brown is once again misinforming us about immigration. His argument on yesterday’s Today programme was that the biggest problem was illegal immigration. He completely ignores the impact on ordinary people that unrestricted legal immigration, of hundreds of thousands a year, has on access to public services.
He ignores how long it takes to train the doctors and nurses needed to provide the necessary health care. He ignores the time and money required to build housing for them. All of this has a direct, detrimental impact upon the lives of ordinary people.
Phil Coutie
Exeter, Devon
SIR – When the Brexit campaign emerges victorious, David Cameron’s position as prime minister will be untenable. Financial arrangements for pensioners will no longer be in his gift.
Carole Heaton
Wrightington, Lancashire
SIR – The “triple lock” to increase UK state pensions by at least 2.5 per cent a year, even when earnings growth is less, will eventually become unsustainable, whether Britain remains in the EU or leaves it.
Pension increases have to be paid for out of increased UK taxes. The EU is not a magic money tree to fund extravagant pension promises made by British or other nations’ politicians, as the Greeks have recently found out.
It is about time Remain campaigners found some honest and credible positive reasons for Britain to remain in the EU. Instead they keep invoking dodgy forecasts of doomsday scenarios that would be equally likely to happen if Britain stayed in the currently mismanaged EU.
As long as Britain produces goods and services that people all round the world want, people will buy them, with or without a trade agreement. I look at the labels on the merchandise I see on sale in Britain and France. Much comes from China, Bangladesh, Japan, India, Indonesia, Turkey and Vietnam. None of these countries are in the EU single market but are obviously successfully trading with the UK and the EU.
If there is a positive argument for the EU, let’s hear it, instead of childish threats and bogus disaster scenarios.
Brian Newton
Epsom, Surrey
SIR – I sense that some would-be Brexit voters are motivated by old-fashioned, jingoistic Rule Britannia-ism. I offer them this thought. Do you really want to leave the Irish as the sole native speakers of English, the new lingua franca, in Europe, with all the enhanced influence that goes with it?
You’ve lost a world empire and you miss it. Why not replace it by a kind of linguistic, cultural imperialism in Europe? And it’s hard to do that from outside.
You think that’s a petty argument? It is certainly no more so than the jingoism to which it is a reply and which threatens to lead Britain into dangerous isolation.
Professor Richard Dawkins
Oxford
SIR – We have asked our children how to vote next week, since they will live with the consequences longer.
Tim Twist
Matlock, Derbyshire
