Letter to Jeremy Quin

This is the text of an email I have sent to my MP, Jeremy Quin:

Dear Mr Quin

I am writing to urge you to vote against Prime Minister May's proposed Withdrawal Agreement.

I voted Remain in the referendum, but accepted the result. People voted Leave for many reasons, but perhaps the most fundamental one was to reclaim the sovereignty we had given up to the EU. 

But I had not fully appreciated all the difficulties that would arise in achieving a satisfactory Brexit. In particular, I had not appreciated the importance of our current frictionless trade with the continent, the Good Friday Agreement and the many EU agencies that would all need their own separate arrangements, such as the Galileo project and the EASA.

The more *sovereignty* we reclaim from the EU, the less we can participate in the *benefits* of the EU; that much is obvious. Leave voters, I presume, placed a higher value on the sovereignty we would reclaim than the benefits we would lose, whilst I, as a Remain voter, valued the benefits more than the dilution of sovereignty. 

But now we have a much clearer estimation of the sovereignty we are reclaiming and the costs of departure. Mrs May's deal means we will have *no* say in the rules of the EU, which rules we will still have to closely observe, since it is our closest trading bloc. We will lose our ability to travel and work freely in the EU. We will lose frictionless trade, which will hit our GDP hard, according to the Government's own forecasts. We endanger the Good Friday Agreement, with all the dark possibilities that would entail.

So, in fact, the best deal on offer (according to the government), actually means *less* sovereignty than we currently enjoy within the EU, and vastly increased costs to leaving. We also threaten the peace in Northern Ireland. These matters were not apparent at the time of the referendum - the Leave campaigns suggested there would be a Brexit dividend, that we were taking back control and there would be solutions to the Northern Ireland border issue.

Since the population is now much clearer about the reduction in sovereignty that will arise under Mrs May's deal, the vast costs of leaving, and the threat to peace in this country, the democratic thing to do would be to have another vote to confirm the public are in favour of paying these costs, suffering this reduction in sovereignty and threatening our own peace.

I hope you will therefore agree to vote against the deal and instead insist on another referendum to clarify the views of the electorate in the light of these now-known consequences of Brexit.

Kind regards

Mark Jones