Inflammatory language amid the battle of Brexit

Gaby Hinsliff unwittingly exposes a key fault line that produced a seismic referendum result (Brexiters have a choice: visa caps or doctors, 13 June). She assumes that “foreigners” are essential to staff care homes and hospitals, and pick farm crops – and at the same time that leavers simply share a “passionate desire for fewer foreigners to be working here”.

Such a blithe acceptance of how free-market economics has impacted on employment conditions in so many sectors – and of the government’s cuts in medical and nursing training – is fundamentally reactionary.

In a country where mass unemployment and underemployment is hidden from the middle-class gaze (only occasionally paraded for our contemptuous amusement on reality TV), too many comfortable people believe certain work should have poor wages and conditions and is therefore naturally suited to “foreigners” – rather than the unemployed who, in turn, must be lazy and xenophobic.

That parochial contempt also extends to the taxpaying “foreigners” who fund the training of our doctors and nurses because our government won’t: some of the world’s poorest countries have transferred billions to the UK in the form of trained medical staff, but we want even more – because it’s all about us.

While those countries we have plundered for hospital staff are owed some serious compensation, the UK should choose investment in the economy and health service, and stronger regulation of employment conditions – not these shortsighted recriminations over the referendum.
Peter McKenna
Liverpool

• Martin Kettle’s reference to the “monstering” of Dominic Grieve in the Daily Mail last week (May’s Brexit crunch vote was just the first of many, 15 June) does not comment on the apocalyptic tone of its final paragraphs, which argued that “the sight of the elite grabbing power from the Queen’s government will rupture trust in the ballot box. That could imperil centuries of British support for parliamentary democracy.”

Similar threats that parliamentary modification of the government’s drift towards a chaotic Brexit will “ignore the will of the people” have appeared in the Express and the Sun. The Sun’s editorial on 14 June talked of “the contempt these MPs have for democracy … they seem neither to know or to care what they will unleash”.

I worry increasingly what such inflammatory language will unleash. Time for those in all parties and none to defend reasoned debate, compromise and concern for the national interest against those who are pushing us towards illiberal democracy?
William Wallace
Liberal Democrat, House of Lords

• Your article (Dacre tells Mail’s next editor not to dilute Brexit backing, 14 June) quotes Paul Dacre saying: “Support for Brexit is in the DNA of both the Daily Mail and, more pertinently, its readers.”

However, it turns out this is not the case. The headline of the Daily Mail from 1 January 1973 was “Europe, Here We Come!” Also, above the headline was “For ten years the Mail has campaigned for this day. We have not wavered in our conviction that Britain’s best and brightest future is with Europe.”

It’s a shame that Mr Dacre is so ignorant of his own paper’s history. Given that he and the majority of the paper’s readership were born before 1973, it stands to reason that being pro-EU must actually be in their DNA.
Jonathan Tuppeny
Epsom, Surrey

• Wow! Something’s hitting home to deserve that bile (Kate Hoey’s quirks are no longer funny – she should resign, G2, 14 June). Had Zoe Williams spoken to her colleagues, she would have known that a number of them have worked with me to gain testimonies from poor and working-class people who are simply being screwed into destitution by the jobs market and the benefits system. I never cease trying to fulfil my responsibility to my roots. Why is there a strain of the left that always wants to believe the worst about people on their own side?
Frank Field MP
Labour, Birkenhead

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