LETTER: Brexit is just wishful thinking

I had just turned 30, just married and we were expecting our first child. I left a very solid job to join a colleague in a new company. Today, four in 10 new companies fail in five years.

We started work in two upstairs rooms in an end of terrace house. We had to be ruthlessly honest about ourselves and our company. We had no overblown ideas although I did pin up on the wall an advert for a house that had a tennis court in the grounds. I had no house or any assets at the time.

As our company started to grow we formulated our forward growth and every time we needed help from the bank we had to provide a very practical forward plan. There was no question of saying we might be able to pick up business from these people and we had to have plans in the event that our normal market failed.

Fifteen years later our turnover had grown to £34m, we were tying up million pound deals every fortnight. We had a three quarter acre industrial estate in East London, around 80,000 sq ft of works and offices in the West Midlands and very smart offices in South London. I had a six-bedroomed house in three acres in Kent. We had a tennis court, stables and horses for our four children who all went to private schools.

I left and came up to the Midlands where I was born because those who I had worked so hard for were being turned against me. Brexit is not even a plan let alone a practical one. It is all about wishful thinking and it is not even certain that it now has the blessing of the majority.

Roger Watts, Walsall