Paul Rayment (Letters, September 27) is the latest in a long line of letters correspondents arguing the case for EU membership as though that body was purely a free trade area. If only it was then there would be few objections to membership but the reality is that the free market is the bait on the political hook.
Whether or not Adam Smith would have agreed to the UK being under the political control of a Brussels-based body in pursuit of a degree of free trade, as Rayment seeks to imply, is quite another matter.
He writes of the UK becoming a “backwater” but this is precisely what it had become in political terms within the EU, whatever its theoretical position of influence. He writes that
“. . . in rejecting out of hand any sort of return to the single market or the customs union [Starmer] fails, like the Brexiters, to acknowledge (or realise) how deeply the UK was, and for the moment still is, integrated with the economies of the EU.” This is not correct. This point is fully understood by Brexiters as it represents the very means by which the EU controlled the UK.
It was the main reason why most of us voted to leave and why we must never rejoin. We need to lose our Euromyopia and see beyond this bureaucratic and introspective body.
John Murray
Guildford, Surrey, UK
