No deal: how bad would it be?
As a former head of the civil service, “I never thought that I would say this”, said Bob Kerslake in The Sunday Times – but I welcomed the leak of the Cabinet Office report on the Government’s plans to cope with a no-deal Brexit, codenamed Operation Yellowhammer. Compiled earlier this month, the dossier lays out the expected results – not even the worst-case scenario – of a failure to reach an agreement with the EU. And it shows “that a no-deal Brexit is fraught with risk and could be hugely damaging to ordinary people’s lives”. There is likely to be “significant” disruption at British ports, lasting up to three months. Medical supplies would be “vulnerable to severe extended delays”, as 73% of our medicines come via the main Channel crossings. Logjams could cause fuel shortages in southeast England. The availability of fresh food would be reduced and prices would rise. The Government also expects a return to a hard border in Ireland, which may spark protests and road blockages.
This is one very dodgy dossier, said Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph. Parts of it simply “cannot be true”. It states that 50%-85% of lorries leaving Britain through the main crossings “may not be ready” for French customs after Brexit, and that traffic flows could halve for three months. In the words of the Calais port chief, Jean-Marc Puissesseau: “C’est la bullshit.”
The day after Brexit, he says, it will be business as usual at Calais: around 90% of trucks won’t need to be checked at all. And if there are no blockages at ports, there will be no shortages of food or medicine, said Simon Wolfson in The Mail on Sunday. It’s true that a no deal would pose real challenges, which the previous government failed to take even “basic” steps to cope with. The current government, by contrast, is preparing energetically. If it does its job properly, “the worst we have to fear is mild disruption”.
Meanwhile, British civil servants and EU officials have been working quietly to mitigate the effects, said Robert Watts in The Sunday Times. There may be no big agreement, but there have been a series of “mini-deals”, or “Brexit parachutes”, which will keep air travel and goods transport going between the UK and the EU. UK citizens will still get visa-free travel to Europe. There will probably be a degree of continuity, whatever happens, said Jeremy Warner in The Daily Telegraph. But there’s no guarantee. Ultimately, we just don’t know how bad a no deal will be: it comes down to Brussels. “Much depends on the degree of punishment, pour encourager les autres, that the EU wants to inflict on the UK for daring to leave.”