This is what readers have been sending us this week. If you would like to send a letter, email bfpletters@london.newsquest.co.uk.

Kind strangers helped me in my hour of need

I would like to thank the young lady that came to my aid and the motorists also that helped me during my predicament at the time on Holtspur hill on Friday, June 21.

Thanks especially to the motorist that lives in the Amersham Road that took me on to Beaconsfield.

I was quite alright afterwards I assure you.

The Maidenhead cyclist

Tip charging policy needs rethinking

Following the Environmental Protection Act a lot of good work has been done over the last 20 years to discourage residents from having bonfires and causing harmful pollution and nuisance smoke.

So much so that until recently bonfires had at long last become a rarity. However, now that Wycombe have chosen to charge residents for the disposal of waste timber and other flammable items, the number of bonfires has, not surprisingly, risen alarmingly.

At a time when other authorities are striving to reduce unnecessary carbon emissions and improve air quality I believe that it is irresponsible of Wycombe to be encouraging bonfires here by charging for timber waste etc.

Hopefully this was unintentional and the policy will be reconsidered ASAP.

Eric Brightwell, Marlow

Your support is hugely appreciated

WTN would like to thank all those people who generously donated to our recent street collection in Marlow, High Wycombe and Princes Risborough.

A total of £354.29 was raised towards the publishing of the newspaper for the partially sighted and blind people of this community.

Thank you for your continued support.

Liz Kelly, Hazlemere

Let’s hear it for the magnificent wild flowers

Last week the older part of the cemetery – close to the Priory Road entrance – was looking magnificent.

The numerous pyramid orchids were out, many wild flowers were in bloom – my husband counted more than 20 on a walk through - and the grasses were wafting in the breeze. The bees and the butterflies were abundant.

By the end of the week: all gone. In their place a strimmed and mowed, very boring field.

What a shame!

Apparently that end of the cemetery is cut less frequently than the modern area but WDC are taken to task by some of the public for leaving it “overgrown”.

I am in minority of one to have asked for the meadow to be left longer and managed as a wild flower area.

There are surely folk out there who share my view.

Make your agreement known – let’s hear it for the wild flowers!

Liz Wyatt, High Wycombe

Explaining my comments on Brexit

In reply to Mr Laurance Reed’s letter in today’s (July 12) letters page in the BFP.

I’m not sure whether to ironically commiserate with Mr Reed on losing me in my letter of 7 June, or congratulate him on once again avoiding a straight answer to a straight question.

Let me explain - the ‘systematic, deliberate, targeted dishonesty on … the Leave side’ refers in particular to the celebrated £350m on the side of a bus, (‘a clear misuse of official statistic’ - Sir David Norgrove, Chair of the UK Statistics Authority), Fox’s claim that there would 40 trade deals in place by last March, the claim by Penny Mordaunt that there was no British veto to stop Turkish migrants flooding the country, the claim that the German auto industry would make the rest of the EU open a new treaty with us because ‘we held all the cards/they needed us more than them’.

If you want more then click on: en.wikiquote.org/wiki/David_Davis#On_Brexit or: www.facebook.com/watch/?v=469122363612705.

It was ‘targeted’ and ‘on an industrial scale’ as it involved the unauthorised use of Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica to target ads at people using their known interests.

It involved ‘massive illegal funding from unknown sources’ as Arron Banks (‘The man who bought Brexit’) recovered from near-bankruptcy in 2013 to being the largest donor in UK political history starting in 2014 - see: www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/how-did-arron-banks-afford-brexit/.

Banks has been unable to convincingly explain where his wealth came from (notably on the Andrew Marr Show) and has made conflicting statements about his links with the Russian government – for which reasons he is under investigation by the NCA. (See: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzlyXAKHkno).

The Leavers were not the underdogs in the referendum – contemporary news reports said the two sides were ‘neck and neck’ and frequently refused to predict an outcome (see: yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2016/02/23/eu-referendum-leave-leads-one or google ‘leave neck and neck referendum’).

Mr Reed lists prominent members of the political establishment who opposed Brexit and says: ‘I would have thought their views were far more likely to have affected … the referendum than anything … by supporters of the Leave campaign.’

A considerable number of the political establishment and former cabinet ministers, including Johnson, Gove, Davis and Nigel Lawson, supported Leave. However, this misses the point – even if the entire British political, military, religious, sporting and military elites had volubly supported Remain, the referendum vote would still be tainted as it was based on the lies referred to above – it was a vote for an illusion.

No one voted in 2016 for a no-deal Brexit, an Irish backstop, or any of the other things we are now being offered by the government – they were never mentioned during the referendum.

(I will say nothing of the dire economic consequences predicted now by all the smart money – even Jeremy Hunt has said he will tell businessmen who go broke that it was a price worth paying for Brexit.)

‘Mr Linehan doesn’t accept this, not because he thinks I’m wrong, but because it doesn’t suit his narrative.’ I could reverse this and say Mr Reed refuses to answer straightforward questions because the facts underlying them don’t suit his narrative.

I was not going to vote in 2016 until the last moment, because it was impossible to guess where the truth lay. I fully support democracy.

My Brexit narrative (and many other people’s) has grown slowly over some years and does not consist of frequently calling out ‘democracy’ and ‘patriotism,’ or quoting honest Yorkshiremen, in default of anything more convincing.

Mr Reed has played his trump card - the ineluctable democratic mandate of the referendum - several times, but has consistently refused to seriously address the questions of dishonesty and foreign manipulation of our democracy that fatally undermine it.

I think I have proven that Mr Reed cannot justify what he claims for democracy and Brexit.

Mr Reed has mentioned he is an Oxford graduate in Law - he should be ashamed of himself for evading simple questions by saying ‘… since they were all thought up by him … he’s more than capable of answering them’. (I shall never feel the same way again about Oxford University Law alumni.)

Perhaps I should end by ironically commiserating with the University of Oxford Faculty of Law for producing a graduate who cannot retire gracefully, or refute his opponent’s arguments.

Lawrence Linehan, Wooburn Green

British people have the final say, not Parliament

The referendum produced a close result. The different was less than four per cent so it is hardly surprising that Dominic Grieve and other Remainers have felt unable to accept what happened.

If voters had given a clear-cut answer, say 60 per cent to 40 per cent for or against, I believe that most MPs would have respected the result and the present divisions in Parliament and the country would never have risen.

Unlike a general election where the result can be reversed the next time round, the result of the referendum on Europe, once it has been enacted, is likely to be permanent.

On those grounds alone, a second referendum might be justified.

Unfortunately, all the indications are that this would produce another close result, in which case we are back at the beginning and the arguments and divisions would continue as before.

The only way to end the current deadlock is to agree that as referendums are now an established way of deciding constitutional questions in Britain, they should be treated as legally binding and not merely advisory.

When MPs voted in favour of holding a referendum on Europe they were not seeking advice. They empowered the people of this country to make a decision and thereby recognised the people’s right to make it.

Dominic Grieve has made much of parliamentary sovereignty in his opposition to Brexit but while MPs may have the legal right to pass any laws they want, there are constraints on what they can do in practice.

The most important is public opinion. It is the public who decide who enters the House of Commons and who does not. It is the public who decide which party is in a position to form a government and which ones are not.

So at the end of the day, it is the British people who have the final say and not Parliament.

Laurance Reed, Beaconsfield