Different view

Usually Mr Barlow’s singular take on life makes me smile and I fully realise that as a columnist he is obliged to take a personal and particular stance, sometimes for the sake of comic effect.

If I understand it correctly, Kenneth Clarke MP does not like referendums and MPs are not in office to reflect the views of their constituents but to make their own valued judgement on what is best for their constituents.

Mr Barlow doesn’t appear to like Mr Clarke’s stance and has extrapolated that Mr Clarke believes that the public are too stupid to be involved in constitutional matters, which should be left to him.

I take something of a different view. The rules of the game in a Parliamentary democracy are that your MP is your representative, not your delegate. You do not, and cannot, mandate an MP to vote a particular way on a given topic.

If you do not like the way he conducts himself in Parliament, you vote him out at the next election.

With regard to referendums, many readers of this newspaper have pointed out that a yes-no answer to a subject as layered and nuanced as our relationship with the EU was never going to bring a satisfactory answer, as has be proven.

I really don’t see how Mr Clarke’s stance in supporting Parliamentary democracy and opposing binary referendums could in any way be construed as the slippery slope towards a one-party state or that politicians’s don’t like democracy.

But we’re all entitled to our opinion, I just don’t happen to agree with Mr Barlow’s.

Paul Gallimore Address supplied Fly anger SO the Fly feels he needs to tell us, yet again, just how angry he is about Brexit.

Well frankly I and most other people, leavers and remainers alike are sick to death of a small but hardcore bunch of angry remainers telling us just how angry they are.

What makes me really angry Fly, is the abuse of your position.

You have the privilege of being given half a page to yourself every week to say what you like with total anonymity and choose to abuse it by ramming your political views down our throats. Who are you and what is so special about you that grants you this privilege?

And to the editor, why do you continue to allow your local newspaper, which should be politically neutral, to be hijacked by this partisan preaching at us from his anonymous pulpit week after week? If you must let him then why aren’t the opposing views given an equal airing?

It’s not good enough to rely on a few readers to redress the balance the following week.

If the Fly thinks he’s angry about Brexit, just think how angry he would be if his side had actually won the referendum and were now being denied their victory by a small but fanatical bunch of militant Brexiteers aided and abetted by lying duplicitous politicians who chose to give us the referendum in the first place, who promised it would be a once in a generation affair, said they would honour the result and have since been re-elected on a manifesto pledge to do just that but have spent the last two years doing everything they can to make implementing the result as difficult as possible.

Paul Cotton Address supplied