I HAVE been struck by the various pronouncements of some Brexiters that should there be a No Deal Brexit the UK could simply move to World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules and there would be nothing to fear. This is simply not true and putting aside the major economic damage, the UK will be unable to have frictionless, tariff-free trade under WTO rules for up to seven years in the event of a No Deal Brexit.

There are two insurmountable hurdles to the UK trading on current WTO tariffs in the event of Britain crashing out in October.

First, the UK must produce its own schedule covering both services and each of the 5,000-plus product lines covered in the WTO agreement and get it agreed by all the 163 WTO states in the remaining parliamentary sitting days until October 31. A number of states have already raised objections to the UK’s draft schedule: 20 over goods and three over services.

The second hurdle is the sheer volume of domestic legislation that would need to be passed before being able to trade under WTO rules: there are nine statutes and 600 statutory instruments that would need to be adopted.

For those advocating a No Deal Brexit there is a responsibility to be honest with the British public. Yes, it can be done but the idea that the UK would simply move on to WTO tariffs, which would in themselves have a major economic impact, is far from simple.

Alex Orr, Edinburgh EH9.

HAVING listened to politicians and political pundits claiming the election was a “huge success” for those wishing to leave the EU, I studied the results and found myself totally confused. Leaving aside the Conservative and Labour parties which clearly have no agreed policy, other than members of the first seeking to enhance their political careers in a leadership contest, and the latter the same in a General Election, and omitting those who stood as individuals or for single-issue campaigns, the official statistics show that, while Nigel Farage’s new party won the largest number of seats, it did not win an overall majority – usually taken as the indicator of success.

Further, the Leave campaign did not win a majority at UK level. In terms of the percentage of votes Leave gained 32.6 per cent, Remain candidates took 37.9 per cent, with the Don’t Knows (Conservative and Labour) gathering 25.9 per cent, with the remaining 3.6 per cent to candidates not expressing a view of the EU. In terms of the number of votes cast for each option this was 6,009,946 for Leave: 6,494,189 for Remain, and 4,571,672 Con/Lab and 140,624 for others. The results in Scotland and Northern Ireland were even more emphatically in favour of Remain.

In light of the facts, would it not be reasonable for politicians et a. to accept that on Thursday May 23, the people spoke and they said Remain – or will they continue to argue that nothing has changed in the past almost three years and that the very narrow victory for Leave in the referendum of 2016 is set in stone? After all, we have been repeatedly told that the will of the people is paramount.

T J Dowds, Cumbernauld.

THE Brexit Party fought the recent European election campaign saying that MPs have blocked Brexit, and have stopped the UK leaving the EU. But is that correct?

At the time of the referendum, the Conservatives had a majority, and they could have designed a Tory Brexit, and got that deal through Parliament. They had enough of a majority to render any opposition irrelevant. What stopped Brexit was that PM Theresa May called for a General Election, and threw away her majority. The people spoke and stopped Theresa May implementing her version of Brexit.

Brexit was stopped not by MPs, but by the people. With a confirmatory vote the only possible route out of this impasse, the people should now have an opportunity to speak again.

Phil Tate, Edinburgh.

IT was in the 1920s that a British civil servant, Arthur Salter, and his French counterpart, Jean Monnet, when attached to the League of Nations, conceived the idea of a United States of Europe. It would be ruled by a government of unelected technocrats. Arthur Salter established the template on which the European Union – an organisation wholly antithetical to a free trade area – was later modelled in his book The United States of Europe, published by George Allen & Unwin in 1931. Is it this straitjacket that so many disillusioned voters across Europe seem desperate to discard?

Duncan McAra, Bishopbriggs.