‘No deal better than bad deal Brexit’

– British Prime Minister Theresa May has said that failing to secure a deal with the European Union before Britain leaves the bloc next year “wouldn’t be the end of the world”, Sky News reported yesterday.

May’s comment, made to reporters as she headed to Africa to boost Britain’s trade ties ahead of Brexit in March 2019, came after her finance minister, Philip Hammond, said last week a no-deal departure from the EU would dam- age public finances.

Ahead of her arrival in South Africa, May said the forecasts cited by Hammond were out of date.

“When they came out, I was very clear on a previous trip that those figures were a work in progress at that time,” she said, according to Sky.

She repeated comments from the head of the World Trade Organisation that Britain leaving the EU without a deal “would not be a walk in the park”, but that “it would not be the end of the world”.

Hammond was criticised by some lawmakers in May’s divided Conservative Party for saying last week, on the day the government published contingency plans for a no-deal Brexit, that such a scenario could mean borrowing would be about £80 billion a year higher in 15 years’ time as the economy grew more slowly.

May repeated that a no-deal Brexit was better than a bad deal.