YOU know when you’re a child and you want something you can’t have? That time when you asked Father Christmas for a real fire engine or a trip to the moon?

What if Brexit turns out to be like that? What if it turns out that the rest of the EU did not ‘need us more than we need them’? What if all that ‘red tape’ is actually the stuff that protects workers, citizens and the environment from the amoral self-serving extremism of global corporation?

What if striking a trade deal with Trump’s America turns out not to protect our NHS but to destroy it? What if Rees-Mogg turns out not to have ordinary people’s best interests at heart? What if Trump destroys NATO?

What if Trump and Putin are weakening the EU not to make the UK stronger but to make Russia and the US strong?

What if we have been fed a lie and left our team, the EU we have helped to build, only to find there is no green grass over the hill?

What if that is why, after two years, the Tory Government has failed to produce any credible plan for Brexit?

Christian Vassie,

Blake Court,

Wheldrake, York

People are entitled to their own opinions

IT seems Christian Vassie considers that the UK is a rich country; certainly there are countries around the world who are poorer than us (“Aid spending aimed at cutting immigration”, Letters, July 5).

Even so, we must acknowledge that we have problems funding the NHS and social care, and many of our own ordinary citizens struggle to make a living, as witnessed by the growing need to rely on welfare payments and food banks.

More worrying is that he is convinced he knows what motivates people to act as they do and what the Government and millions of people are thinking.

I am reminded of George Orwell’s Thought Police.

We have enough problems dealing with what people actually do, without worrying about what we think they think.

Surely in a democracy people are entitled to their own opinions.

Pamela Brown,

Goodwood Grove, York