UK like a lamb to the slaughter

Dear Sir,

In my previous letters, which you have kindly published, I have set out the disastrous implications of Brexit and analysis showing that the "harder" the Brexit scenario the Government opts for, the worse the hardship to be suffered by the ordinary people of this county.

Once again, our prime minister, in her speech at the Mansion House last Friday, opted for a "hard" Brexit in which the UK will be outside the EU's single market and the EU's customs union.

Almost the only economist to argue their case is Prof Patrick Minford, who in 2016 made the extraordinary admission that Brexit would "mostly eliminate manufacturing" in the UK. So it is clear that the implications for manufacturing from our prime minister's stance on Brexit will be disastrous.

Yet unbelievably, the implications of Brexit for our manufacturwithin hours of Mrs May's Mansion House speech with president Trump launching a new trade war, imposing tariffs of 25% on steel and 10% on aluminium, and he made it clear that there will not be any countries exempted from these new tariffs. The impact of these new tariffs on British industry will be nothing short of devastating.

It was the launching of tariffs in 1930 by the USA that triggered the Great Depression with the inevitable consequences of world-wide mass unemployment. We are now in danger of such a dreadful scenario befalling us all once again.

The only way to combat a trade war launched by president Trump is by the threat of retaliation from an equally powerful economic group of countries to convince him that this "America First" policy will not result in "win win" for the United States of America.

Any country that stands alone and isolated like the UK after a "hard" Brexit in such a worldwide tariff war would be like a lamb to the slaughter.

With the threat of a worldwide tariff war, the UK has never in its history since the formation of the EU needed to be part of the EU's single market and the EU's customs union more than it does today.- Yours faithfully,

ROBERT DOUGLAS

Congleton.