Theresa May clearly believed “you Brexit, you fixit” when she appointed Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox to cut a deal that would keep Britain’s economy afloat. EU leaders may insist that the “four freedoms” are non-negotiable if the UK wants single market access, but that mantra is starting to sound hollow.

The European Commission’s proposed new curbs on access to social security benefits will mean migrants have no “legal right to residence” if they do not work or actively seek a job. In addition, the rising pan-European terrorism threat means that the French and German experiences will place free movement reform in the forefront of the EU agenda.

Restrictions to free movement, such as an emergency brake, may just be enough to permit a soft Brexit deal allowing the UK to keep much of its single market access. The Prime Minister must ignore her Europhobic backwoodsmen and parachute in a better negotiating team. It is looking as if terrorism may have given her a hand to play in 2017.

John Cameron

St Andrews

The last resort is our only resort

I was very pleased to read the suggestion in your editorial on Boxing Day that the Prime Minister should rebuild our depleted armed forces. We now have less warships available at sea than at any time in our history: so few in fact that we could not contemplate sending our not yet operational aircraft carriers anywhere near a battle zone. While there has been much criticism of President-elect Trump's threat to use nuclear weapons, the UK public are largely unaware that our own conventional forces are so inadequate that we also are only one step from having to use them ourselves for lack of any other credible military capability.

Robert Forsyth, Commander Royal Navy

Deddington

I’ve been doublethinking about 2016

While rereading George Orwell's 1984 on Christmas Day, I came across a quotation that seemed eerily familiar to this reader in 2016: “Doublethink ... is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.”

Welcome to our world, Mr Orwell.

Graham Powell

Cirencester

Don’t be so eager

Please stop calling our situation since the referendum “post-Brexit” it is not. Brexit will not happen for another two years at least. The term in use should be “post-referendum”. The other statement is misleading. Nothing much is going to happen until we actually leave the European Union, so all forecasts on the subject are dubious at the very least. The tenuous argument that the economy has grown because of the referendum could as easily be read that the nation are aware we might all be broke by 2020. Spend now for tomorrow we starve. This is fast becoming a tiresome subject.

Mark Normandy