Timothy Garton-Ash is right to be worried that Brexit Britain’s political class is now monolingual, with very little personal contact with deciders in the EU (If the UK wants to rejoin the European Union, it first needs to understand it, 15 June).
He lists pro-EU forces in politics and polls, but it is an error to assume that politicians will not buckle and bend faced with the united onslaught of media Europhobia, especially the Musk-Vance bottomless purses to campaign on behalf of Donald Trump against Europe.
And he ignores the elephant not in the room – Kemi Badenoch’s Tory party, which is today as monomaniacally anti-European as British communists and Trotskyists in trade unions were from 1950-90.
Roy Hattersley, who has just died, was a rare senior Labour figure unafraid to say that Tony Benn, Arthur Scargill, Barbara Castle and Jeremy Corbyn were wrong as they denounced the European community as a capitalist, conservative conspiracy.
Labour figures like Hattersley and Shirley Williams were willing to tell the truth about the European community. I cannot identify a single Tory MP willing to stand up to Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe and Elon Musk about the EU. Britain, like 18th-century Spain, has opted for slow, steady decline into economic weakness and geopolitical irrelevance.
Reversing that process requires a reconnection to our trading partners and fellow democracies. But that won’t happen without a single Conservative MP able to tell the truth that Brexit has failed the country and needs to be put out of its misery.
Dr Denis MacShane
Former Europe minister
John Harris’s Makerfield dispatch (Opinion, 19 June)captured something larger than a byelection. The hollowed-out towns, the grievance on every corner – this is the country that Britain built by walking away from the table.
Brexit was a man sawing off the branch he is sitting on. Britain’s greatest leverage was never as a lonely island shouting across the Atlantic. It was as the natural leader of Europe. France wants to lead but cannot. Germany will not. Only Britain can – and Britain is standing outside the door, pretending it prefers the rain.
Two thousand years of Chinese history teaches one lesson without exception: a state that makes an enemy of its own neighbourhood has already lost. You do not fight the continent on your doorstep and win. Britain has chosen to defy not one nation but an entire continent. The arithmetic is not complicated.
Without Britain at the helm, Europe is a ship of technocrats with no captain. Faced with a real adversary, it will crack. Here is the choice, stripped of sentiment. Either Britain leads Europe or there is no Britain to speak of – and before long, no Europe either.
You will not like reading this from a Chinese observer. Good. Argue with it. But first ask yourselves: what if it is true?
Zhengli Zhou
Liupanshui, Guizhou, China