MAYBE one should admire the sheer obstinacy in David Loxley (Gazette & Herald letters, December 12) still arguing “Do not believe the doomsters, your guess is as good as theirs”, even while his country hurtles towards the cliff edge.

Or in Ann Cleverly (in the same issue) still preaching that it’s all about “sovereignty”, even while her country’s power and influence dwindles into the status of a laughing stock.

What I cannot admire at all is that Mr Loxley, having contradicted his own argument by conceding that life outside the EU will in fact be much harder, then insults the whole generation which will have to get us out of this mess by suggesting that UK businessmen have “never, in their working lives,” had to “do some hard business work”.

Judging by national opinion polls, the great majority of Ryedale’s young people would rather that we remained in the EU.

It was Mr Loxley’s democratic right to vote for Brexit, and it remains his right to believe what he likes even in the face of all the evidence. But having seen his own heroes either fail to produce any viable plan for Brexit (Johnson, Fox and Davis) despite holding all the key government posts for that purpose, or fail even to make a pretence of engaging seriously with the process (Farage, who simply retired from politics having won his little opinion poll), Mr Loxley should not be insulting the younger generation whom he has wished this disaster upon.

Dick Jennings, Malton

Fatal mistake

IT is a fatal mistake to concentrate solely on the economic effects of Brexit.

England’s greatest export to the world is our concept of liberty under the law as provided by Magna Carta 1215, specifically trial by jury, which is how the people rule by deciding which law is just or unjust and by annulling a bad law, cause it to be extracted from the statue book. This is phenomenal people power of a very stable kind and is called “legal democracy”.

In contrast we are tricked into voting for a party system of “suffrage” which our politicians misname “democracy”, which requires us to consent to one or other of their pre-arranged manifesto “packages” which they allow us to have, but from which there is no opt out.

We blindly transfer this phenomenal power to the politicians to legislate as they like and then complain that they are not listening to us. It must be increasingly obvious that swopping parties makes no difference, leading to voter disgust and loss of interest.

It gets even worse, because in 1973 this “elective dictatorship” as just described subordinated itself to the open dictatorship of the Napoleonic legal system, the EUSSR, where there is no protection of trial by jury and Magna Carta and where bureaucrats and government officials make thousands of laws and enforce them through the European Arrest Warrant so that no Common Law testing of the evidence is allowed before extradition to a European jail, as Julian Assange and others found out.

You don’t require much imagination to feel what life in such a jail would be like, waiting months in a queue behind real criminals for a judge to attend your case. If readers think this doesn’t apply to them they should realise that European social law is getting increasingly intrusive backed by heavily armoured police even in Britain.

Those 16-year-olds who want a vote and think the grass is greener in Europe are as ignorant of their priceless heritage which is being stolen from them as their elder, supposedly betters.

Martin Cruttwell, Scrayingham

We deserve better

IT is more than four years since the Northern Powerhouse initiative was announced by the then Chancellor, George Osborne.

In their recent report State of the North 2018, the Institute for Public Policy Research has revealed how little has actually been achieved.

The figures are damning: since the inception of the “powerhouse”, spending per head in London has increased by twice as much as spending in the North; Northern productivity is 12.6 per cent lower than the national average; two million working-age people and one million children in the north live in households below the poverty line; and many neighbourhoods with the lowest life expectancy are in Northern cities.

Our congested roads and railways are a national disgrace and our broadband speeds are in the bottom third of the EU, behind Bulgaria.

According to the Political Economy Research Centre, inner London is Europe’s richest region, but most of the other British regions are poorer than the European average. This makes the UK the most geographically unbalanced economy in Europe.

Mr Osborne’s talking up of a Northern Powerhouse now looks to have been no more than a cynical smokescreen. For almost 10 years, successive Conservative-led governments have let the North down badly.

We deserve better than this: a national rebalancing plan and some real joined-up thinking.

Dr Peter Williams, Malton