Kent council boss: No Deal won’t be disruptive

THE head of Kent Council said he was ‘pretty confident’ the country would avoid disruption in the event of a No Deal Brexit.

Operation Yellowhammer documents – a civil service briefing on the worst-case scenario of leaving without a deal – had warned that lorry drivers could face delays of up to two and a half days outside Dover.

But Paul Carter, leader of Tory-run Kent County Council, said he believed plans were in place to avoid disaster.

Asked if he was worried about a No Deal Brexit, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘As long as we get satisfactory answers and progress on how the operating model for customs clearance is going to work, and communicate that to the logistics haulage industry, I am pretty confident that we can avoid disruption in Kent.’

He said ‘accelerated progress’ had been made since the Yellowhammer report was drafted on August 2. However, he added: ‘There are still two or three outstanding matters which I am beating the drum on which need resolving in short order.’

Mr Carter said he wanted police officers from across the country drafted in to help handle traffic if a deal is not reached. He called for ‘boots on the ground’ and assurances that arrangements were in place for police and Highways England staff to be ready to ‘man the pumps’.

Labour MPs demanded Parliament be recalled to discuss the Yellowhammer documents, which were published officially on Wednesday night. Shadow transport secretary Andy McDonald said: ‘This is more like emergency planning for war or a natural disaster... it does not get more stark, and we have got to wake up to the issues around us.’

Gordon Brown claimed the Government is ‘still not telling the truth’ about medicine and food shortages in the event of No Deal. However, Boris Johnson sought to downplay the potential impact, calling the report a plan for the ‘worst-case scenario’.

He added that ‘particularly in the 50 days since I’ve been Prime Minister, we’ve been massively accelerating our preparations’.

Mr Johnson said: ‘We’re trying to get a deal and I’m very hopeful that we will get a deal with our European friends on October 17th or 18th or thereabouts.

‘But if we have to come out on October 31st with No Deal, we will be ready. What you’re looking at here is just the sensible preparations – the worst-case scenario – that you’d expect any government to do.’

AT LUNCHTIME in the pub yesterday, my friend Chris recalled a story his late father told him about a wartime supper the old man had enjoyed in 1941, when he was a youngster living in SouthEast London during the Blitz.

Then aged 12, Chris’s dad returned home from school one day to find that his mother had cooked him a delicious meat pie — the most substantial meal he had eaten in more than a year of acute food shortages. After scraping the last exquisite morsels from his plate, the boy told his mum that he planned to round off a perfect day by playing with his beloved pet rabbit in the garden.

There was an awkward silence. You’ve guessed it. At that very moment, the unfortunate animal in question was working its way through its besotted owner’s digestive tract. Not something you’d easily forget.

To listen to the wails of Remainers this week, after the forced publication of the Government’s ‘Reasonable Worst-Case Planning Assumptions’ for Brexit, you might think that similar horrors await us all if we pull out of the EU on October 31 without a deal.

Condemned

If Operation Yellowhammer’s worstcase imaginings become reality, will Woolton pie make an unwelcome return to the nation’s dinner tables? (For the benefit of younger readers, I should explain that this was a dish of vegetables encased in pastry, named after the wartime Minister for Food and recommended by his ministry as a substitute for meat).

For afters, will we be condemned to that other wartime favourite, Mock Banana Sandwiches — a mush of parsnips, banana extract and sugar (if we can find any), served between two slices of National Loaf bread?

Call me a ludicrously optimistic Pollyanna, but I have a strong feeling that it won’t come to anything remotely like this, even in the increasingly unlikely event that Boris is permitted to get us out of the EU by the halloween deadline without a deal.

True, the summary of Operation Yellowhammer’s findings, released under ministerial protest this week, warns that ‘certain types of fresh food supply will decrease,’ adding: ‘Critical dependencies for the food supply chain (such as key input ingredients, chemicals and packaging) may be in shorter supply.’

But though it cautions that prices may rise, hitting the poor hardest, it goes on: ‘In combination, these two factors will not cause an overall shortage of food in the UK but will reduce availability and choice of products.’

As for precisely which foods may be in shorter supply — and where our choice will be limited if the worst comes to the worst — the document is maddeningly silent. Speaking for myself, it really won’t break my heart if, say, the Whole Foods supermarket beneath the Mail’s London headquarters is forced for a few months to reduce its range of cheeses from the 500-plus on offer yesterday (e.g. ‘ Moliterno Truffle Paste Cheese’, ‘Bergerie Organic Goat’s Milk Cheese’ and ‘Cicioni Vegan Nut Cheese’) to a more modest couple of hundred.

Nor will I mind much if supplies of Lithuanian Scalded Rye Bread, Sojade Organic Plain Bifidus Soya Yoghurt or Califia Farms Barista Blend almond milk — all available from the same supermarket — were to dry up for a while.

But then I am a man of simple tastes, whose heart sinks when I’m sent to Sainsbury’s with instructions from Mrs U to buy butter, only to be faced with a selection of a dozen different brands.

Whichever I pick, it’s bound to be the wrong one. Oh, how much simpler life would be if we in the pampered developed world weren’t confronted with a hundred decisions a day.

Protests

Yes, I grant you that Operation Yellowhammer raises issues we should worry about — such as significant electricity price rises, disruption to transport services and the possibility of delays in cross-Channel supplies of medicines for human and animal use.

But that’s nothing that can’t be sorted out in the weeks remaining until October 31. Why can’t we fly medicines in? Indeed, I’m told there’s been plenty of spare capacity in the air freight business since Donald Trump launched his trade war against China.

The report may also be right to warn that mass protests by those who refuse to accept the referendum result, and counter- demonstrations by Brexiteers, ‘may absorb significant amounts of police resource’. But it cannot be emphasised too strongly that these are not official forecasts of what will happen if we pull out without a deal.

As the rubric on the front page spells out, they are worst- case scenarios. Indeed, the worst may well not happen, but it’s obviously sensible to plan for it.

It should also be stressed that much has changed in the few weeks since this document was finalised on August 2. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Amber Rudd, who stalked out of the Cabinet and the Tory Party, citing the preposterous reason that Boris and his fellow ministers were devoting too great a proportion of their energies to guarding against the ill- effects of withdrawing without a deal.

Or tune in to Paul Carter, Tory chairman of Kent Council, whose county stands to suffer most from problems arising from any delays in cross- channel trade through Dover. On Radio Four’s Today programme yesterday, he said that ‘accelerated progress’ had been made since the Yellowhammer report, adding that if two or three outstanding matters could be sorted out, ‘I am confident that we can avoid disruption in Kent’.

To the extremists on the Remainer fringe, on the other hand, the Yellowhammer document is proof positive that Boris is leading us into Armageddon.

Take transport secretary Andy McDonald, who declared that it reveals an ‘absolute catastrophe for our country’.

‘This is more like emergency planning for war or a natural disaster,’ he said.

Or take Dominic Grieve, who was behind the move to force the publication of the Yellowhammer report.

I’ve known him since he was 13, when we appeared together in a Westminster School dramatic production, in which he was typecast as weedy schoolboy with a piping, super-posh voice.

Horrors

Though the voice has dropped an octave, he hasn’t changed much otherwise. But I’ve never seen him so excited as in recent days and weeks, when he’s been talking up the horrors of Brexit, threatening to send Boris to prison and plotting to seize the private correspondence of the PM’s Brexiteer aides. Poor Dominic. he appears to be suffering as nasty a case of Brexit Derangement Syndrome as you’ll ever shudder to see.

Meanwhile, the BBC’s Economics Editor Faisal Islam harrumphed: ‘This is not an “old” Yellowhammer assessment, as was claimed by the Government in August. It is from the latest internal No Deal planning, from August, from well within the time of Boris Johnson’s administration.’

Oh, come off it, Mr Islam. Boris was only nine days into his premiership when this document was drafted. Since then, he appears to have done a huge amount more to get Britain ready for whatever may happen than the likes of Philip hammond achieved in all the years that have passed since the referendum.

So, no, I reckon our family pets have no reason to fear they’ll end up in the cooking pot, deal or no deal.

But if a No Deal Brexit means we’ll have to go without Lithuanian Scalded Rye bread for a while, well, that’s a price a great many like me are prepared to pay for honouring the referendum result.

Let’s get this over and done with.