AV Martin describes the Brexit negotiations with M Barnier as “an angler plays a prime salmon” (Letters, September 6).

I agree with him, the style and difference between European politicians and our own UK negotiators is quite different and hence no progress seems to be made.

After reading Mr Martin’s letter, later on that day I was reading a book on The Great York Air Raid of 1942 (the so called Baedeker raids).

We had bombed two German cultural cities of Lubeck and Rostok, neither of which had any significant military association.

This angered Hitler so much that he and his side kick, Goebbels, decided they would attack our centres of culture like Bath, Exeter and York as reprisals.

The English would be sick and tired of terror attacks following night after night of attacks on our historical cities, they decided.

Goebbels apparently said: “There is no other way of bringing the English to their senses.

“They belong to a class of human beings with whom you can only talk, after you have first knocked their teeth out.”

I wonder if M Barnier has read the same book?

President de Gaulle of France, right at the onset of English negotiations to join the Common Market said: “She (the UK) has in all her doings very marked and very original habits and traditions.

“In short, the nature, the structure, the very situation that are England’s differ profoundly from those of the continentals.”

So we were never going to fit in no matter how hard we tried.

Stuart Wilson,

Vesper Drive,

Acomb, York