• PAT Edlin’s claim that there is “a national desire to quit the EU” (Corbyn has to recognise a national desire to quit EU, May 5) is exaggerated.

A small majority voted Leave; just under half voted Remain. I know only one Leave voter and in the last three years I have spent more time in Belgium than in Leave-voting England outside London.

From interviews on the wireless with Leave voters it seems many were protesting about matters which were the fault of successive British governments and not of the EU, such as poorly-paid and insecure employment caused by our “flexible” labour market beloved of Conservatives, including Leavers, and New Labour alike.

If that is the case then many Leave voters are likely to change their minds when Brexit goes pear shaped. I do not see that it is “cynical and unrealistic” to offer them a chance to express that change of mind in a second vote.

Also, our day of liberation from the “EUSSR” is scheduled for 2019. The people will not then be the same as in 2016. More than 1,200,000 people born in 1999 and 2000 in England and Wales alone who were ineligible to vote in 2016 will be eligible. On the other hand, more than half a million people in the UK died in 2015, the latest year for which I can find figures from the Office of National Statistics.

If the figures for 2016-2018 are similar then by 2019 one-and-a-half million 2016 voters will have been disenfranchised by death. Most will have been old and the old voted Leave.

So there is hope of reversing the Brexit absurdity or, to adapt de Gaulle’s words from a more calamitous June than 2016’s: “L’Europe a perdu une bataille. Mais l’Europe n’as pas perdu la guerre.”

I add, for transparency, that I am a member of the Green Party and know and respect Caroline Russell, whom Mr Edlin’s letter attacked.

STEPHEN HORNE
Romilly Road, N4