IT’S good to see a robust airing of vehement opinions on the future home of our local football side.

Meanwhile, despite Mrs May’s ugly speech last Tuesday (why not direct to Parliament?), I still await any answers – let alone remotely pragmatic and/or printable ones – to my eight specimen doubts about Brexit, as kindly published by you last October.

A number of our supine local MPs (Nicola Blackwood, Ed Vaizey) cower behind the flimsy falsehood that ‘The People Have Spoken’: hang on a moment! A 13:12 majority of the 72 per cent who voted as entitled to, ie 3/8 of the electorate … while Brits abroad and economically active EU citizens here (paying taxes, raising families) were given no say … merely opted ‘to leave the European Union’ in an ill-framed advisory referendum: no mention, let alone even broad working detail, about the Single Market or Customs Union for instance. 17m, but only that many (barely a quarter of the current 65 million ‘U’K population, indeed) were convinced to back an initiative whose dubious, clunky and potentially irrevocable workings are only coming to light six months later.

We meanwhile have a doubly-unelected Prime Minister dictating what she seems to think we all wanted, a Foreign Secretary whose tactlessness besmirches what little remains of our country’s dignity, and Article 50 seemingly set to go ahead with democratic discussion magnanimously allowed only after it’s too late to make any difference.

Typical post-factual putting of carts before horses, not to mention any stable (or should that be unstable?) door.

Oxford’s collective vote clearly reflected its more sanguine and cheerfully cosmopolitan outlook, yet precious little seems to be being done or said to stop the imminent hijack of our nation by what are patently the forces of falsehood (with their bus-borne fictistics and stridently counterfactual interpretation of the nature and outcome of the referendum).

Shame on us that a fellow Oxford graduate (a geographer once, though from her oblivion to distances in global location one might doubt even that), along with MPs who toe the suicidal party line rather than reflect or even listen to the rational viewpoint of the majority of their unfashionably ‘expert’ constituents, is making a true mock of democracy.

Come on, people: we and our neighbours and children deserve, and we can do, better than this looming shambles!

IAN MILES
Vintner Road
Abingdon