So the Ditchley Park retreat held a cross-party private discussion last week about how to make Brexit work better with our neighbours in Europe (“Secret cross-party summit held to confront failings of Brexit”, News). If they had been reading William Keegan’s splendid columns in the Observer since 2016, they would have known the answer: we can’t. Brexit was won by a very small margin, with only around a third of the electorate actually voting Leave, because people were lied to and encouraged in xenophobic thinking. Brexit is failing to deliver on its promises, not because the Tories haven’t done it properly, but because it was never a viable proposition, as is now obvious with its dire impact on the UK economy.
The answer is not to rejoin the EU, as some would like. What should happen is this: propose to the EU that we rejoin the single market and the customs union. This would be of huge benefit to the country and its economy and would immediately solve the Northern Ireland border problem. And though the off-the-dial Brexiter wing of the Tory party would rail against this, I am confident that a large majority of the UK citizenry would support it.
Mary Pimm
London E9
