Sir, – When reading of James Porter's justified exasperation with the Migration Advisory Committee's (MAC) wholely inappropriate advice about migratory agricultural workers, I looked up who is on this committee.

Of the six names that came up, none appeared to have any direct links to agriculture. None appeared to have been employers in their own right and most of them are academics with economics as their field of 'expertise' – and attached to various universities.

George Bernard Shaw was scathing about teachers when he said: "Those who can, do – those who can't, teach".

I'm a tad disappointed in Richard Wright. He seems to have joined the brigade of journalists who like to blame Boris Johnson for most, if not all of problems with Brexit.

Surely, people's memories are not so short that they have forgotten that the members of the Tory party who voted for him to be leader knew he stood for leaving the EU at Halloween, deal or no deal, before voting for him.

Journalists like Richard keep emphasising that a no deal exit at Halloween must be a disaster. It will only be a disaster if our government and civil service allow it to be so.

If EU countries immediately slap on WTO tariff rates, they should immediately face the same for their exports to us (it's called reciprocity) and industries like farming that are immediately affected compensated until markets are restored.

An old saying is that it takes two to tango and whilst our total economy is smaller than the total economy of the EU, that is not important as we import more from them than they import from us. Already we pay a lot to them directly at present with only a proportion returning.

To parrot Mrs May, 'no deal means no deal' and that includes any inflated 'divorce settlement'.

Our agriculture was less subsidised than the rest of the EU right up till the McSharry reforms of 1992 – and as 'convergence-gate' showed, we still are – and in the first five years since we joined the EEC in 1972, we lost the deficiency payment schemes but didn't benefit much from the intervention buying that was supposed to replace them.

Sandy Henderson

Faulds Farm,

Braco,

Dunblane.