Those who paid the ultimate price on our behalf did so to prevent despots from dismantling systems of representative democracy

I find it strange that he should reference the prosperity afforded by the ‘wonderful British lifestyle’ while acknowledging neither the penury inflicted on the working people of ‘Britain’ by the Conservative Party nor the obvious and calamitous impact – according to expert analysis and the government’s own pre-edited assessments — that a no-deal Brexit would inflict on our standards of living.

Any version of Brexit will render us poorer, less influential and, ignoring the fevered propaganda about the EU’s fabled nefariousness, less free.

Mr Stephenson also correctly invokes the lives sacrificed by past generations.

Now, I wasn’t born in 1936 but I do know that those who paid the ultimate price on our behalf did so in order to prevent dictatorial, populist governments and aspiring despots from dismantling – or proroguing, to use a topical term – the systems that enable representative democracy and parliamentary sovereignty, systems like, say, the one we have here in ‘Britain’.

Matthew Coyle, Holywood