No doubt Jonathan Freedland is right: the chaos of the mini-budget and Brexit are rooted in the same delusional version of national sovereignty (The markets have taken back control: so much for Truss’s Brexit delusion of sovereignty, 14 October). But the link between them is tighter than that.
The self-proclaimed Spartans of Brexit, such as the European Research Group, were explicit that the purpose of Brexit was to free Britain from the shackles of the EU for a particular reason. It was to pursue exactly the type of supply-side reforms introduced in the mini-budget and advocated in the earlier Liz Truss-Kwasi Kwarteng manifesto Britannia Unchained.
The markets have delivered their verdict on this attempt, as Freedland says. Arguably, this verdict applies not just to the Truss-Kwarteng project but equally to the Spartans’ version of Brexit, as opposed to Boris Johnson’s version.
Let us hope that the Spartans’ self-identification turns out to accurately predict a repetition of history, with the Truss-Kwarteng project leading them to failure just like the Spartan king Leonidas. If so, then Karl Marx will have been right: history does indeed repeat itself – the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Or perhaps the appropriate historical parallel is the grand old Duke of York.
Jerry Palmer
London
• It is presumptuous of Jonathan Freedland to assume that those who voted for Brexit were deluded into thinking that there is such a thing as “pure, untrammelled sovereignty”. It is an insult to the 17.4 million people who voted to leave the EU and who, like me, are very aware of the fact that nations do not exist in a vacuum.
It is one thing to take account of our neighbour nations and international forces in making policies, but it is quite another to have these policies imposed on us without our consent – and it was getting that control back that motivated many of those who voted to leave the EU.
The unhinged performance of Liz Truss’s government has nothing to do with Brexit or delusions of grandeur. In fact, Truss campaigned for remain at the referendum and her ideology would have trashed the economy regardless of our membership of the EU. It is all to do with neoliberal free-market ideology and the attempt to reassert it after it has been found to be inadequate at this stage of the evolution of capitalism. As for the markets “taking back control”, they never lost it in the first place, in the UK or the EU.
Fawzi Ibrahim
National officer, Rebuild Britain
• Further to Jonathan Freedland’s reflections on the delusions of post-Brexit sovereignty, I would like to propose a new constitutional arrangement: the UK should have two prime ministers.
The first would indulge popular political fantasies by refusing to fall in with the world market, curtailing immigration at a time of global labour shortage and celebrating a spurious insular sovereignty (a role perhaps for Liz Truss or even Boris Johnson). The second would attend to the troubling realities of the world economy, even when they don’t look appealing painted on the side of a bus.
The first prime minister will be much more entertaining, of course, but the second should be charged with sending them off for a rest when their exuberance becomes dangerous (a role perhaps for Jeremy Hunt).
Stephen Coleman
Professor of political communication, University of Leeds
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