Tag: Catherine Bearder

One of the negotiating positions agreed at Chequers (May wins cabinet agreement for soft Brexit plan, 7 July) is that the UK will “maintain a common rulebook for all goods” but the British parliament could choose not to continue harmonisation, ie it could choose to throw away the rulebook. This may allow different factions in the cabinet to interpret the negotiating document as they please, but it puts the negotiators on both sides of the Channel at a disadvantage. How are they going to make sense of the cabinet’s position? SP Chakravarty Bangor, Gwynedd • It’s time your leader writers, columnists and metropolitan readers woke up to the fact that the arch Brexiter has already won the argument. In brief, only the UK parliament, answerable directly to the UK electorate, should make our laws and only the UK courts should enact those laws. It will take some time and Theresa May’s proposals are a reasonable start. Laurence Williamson Newlyn, Cornwall • Assuming it will be confirmed that the Electoral Commission has found irregularities in the spending return filed by the official leave campaign for the EU referendum (Report, 5 July) and that this campaign failed to comply with electoral law, further doubts will inevitably arise as to the legitimacy of the result. We have no domestic remedy for this approach in UK law but, given the evidence of breaches of electoral law by both the main leave campaigns, the mandate for Brexit is seriously undermined. By the current proposal, that border would only be frictionless for goods but not for people. There will have to be border control to keep some people out of Northern Ireland and if that is the case then the border is no longer frictionless.