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Labour divided over Europe from 1971 up to the present day

<span>Photograph: AFP via Getty Images</span>
Photograph: AFP via Getty Images

Removing the whip from Labour MPs who support Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal may make Owen Jones feel better, but it won’t materially affect the situation (Labour MPs who vote for a Tory deal must lose the whip, 17 October). Their votes, if cast for the deal, may contribute to securing Johnson’s future, which would be a grave error on their part but the past few years have been error strewn and nobody comes out of this well.

Many of us – whether smug, complacent, out of touch or lazy – have to take some responsibility for the outcome of the 2016 referendum, but none of us can live life in reverse. In 1975 I voted to leave the European Economic Community, as many on the left of the party did, but I came to my senses as I watched Margaret Thatcher wreak havoc on our country, and came to admire the progressive proposals and requirements imported from Europe, which turned me into an advocate for continued EU membership. Perhaps the huge mistake we are about to make will shock people into demanding a chance to recant, and at that time we will need a strong left-of-centre party ready to provide leadership, not to ask: “What did you do in the [Brexit] war?”
Les Bright
Exeter, Devon

• Owen Jones cites Ramsay MacDonald as the ultimate class betrayer for joining a coalition with the Conservatives. But he fails to mention that it was 68 rebel Labour MPs in 1971 who ignored a three-line whip and a five-to-one vote at the Labour party annual conference and voted with the Heath Conservative government to get us into the EEC, as it then was. Roy Jenkins, who led the rebels, was condemned at the time as a traitor by the left.

There is a real irony that a group of Labour MPs could now vote against their party’s policy to take us out of the EU when some of their predecessors voted against their party’s policy to take us in.
Andrew Harris
Moulsford, Oxfordshire

• Owen Jones is right. The problem is that Jeremy Corbyn wants Brexit so he is trying to make it easy for leaver MPs to support the Johnson deal. He wants Brexit but not to be blamed for it, hence this ploy.
John Cookson
Bournemouth

• Simon Jenkins (A deal is done. Now let’s end the agony, 18 October) may well be right to proclaim “it is time, surely, to end this agony”, but what has he to say about the agony that Brexit is likely to inflict on the economy, the NHS, the standard of living for a substantial proportion of the population and the future of the union?
Jeremy Beecham
Labour House of Lords

• So this is it. This is Brexit at last. Now we have some substance. Rather than the debate revolving endlessly around the referendum vote and the “will of the people”, we can now ask the substantive question: is the deal on offer better for us as a people than the deal we already have? This is the point we should have reached prior to invoking article 50. Time to rectify matters. Time for the actual debate to begin.
Roy Boffy
Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands

• If it’s such a good deal for Northern Ireland why can’t we have it for the rest of the UK?
Debbie Burton
Levenshulme, Manchester

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