SIR - Every time that any politician or reporter who backed the leave campaign in the referendum appears on TV, they never fail to repeat that we, the public, were told in no uncertain terms that leaving the EU involved leaving the single market and the customs union.

Now, I’m sure this was brought up on numerous occasions during TV debates before and after the vote but the ballot paper was a straight “in or out” decision as far as I recall.

To say that everyone had this made clear is to assume that everyone spends their time watching the news and current affairs TV programmes, which I’m afraid is most definitely not the case.

I would wager that a large proportion of the public had no idea and no interest whatsoever in the single market and the customs union prior to recent debates and were merely swayed by the soundbites and rhetoric spewed out by dogmatic politicians to engineer their agendas.

The public should be able to trust the government to do whatever is in the best interest of our prosperity and security, “no iffs and no buts” and unfortunately this whole sorry circus is starting to prove otherwise.

Colin Durkin, Moffat Close, Bradford