No-deal Brexit: should we dread it?
Conventional wisdom has it that a no-deal exit from the EU would be “nightmarish”, said John Harris in The Guardian – with queues of lorries at the Channel ports, shortages of vital medicines and shops running low on stock. Yet the public doesn’t seem that bothered. Whereas I have never heard any normal person make the case for “Norway plus”, and support for a second referendum is restricted to “a certain kind of middle-class person”, scores of people have recently said to me, unprompted: “We should just get out” or, “Why can’t we just walk away?” England’s rebel spirit is rising, and it wants a no deal. Last week, an ICM poll found that it was the most popular option for Brexit, while on Question Time an endorsement “triggered mass whoops”. A kind of “romanticism surrounds the idea of a besieged post-brexit Britain nobly trying to make its way without the interference of Brussels”.
No deal needn’t be a disaster, said Roger Bootle in The Daily Telegraph. The term is actually a “misnomer”: we don’t need to reach an overarching deal of the kind that Theresa May has proposed. Instead, a series of “miniagreements” on crucial issues such as citizens’ rights and haulage licences could be made. The significance of “friction” at the EU’S borders has been massively overstated. If it is so important, how is it that countries all over the world manage to export into the EU without joining up? That’s a very dangerous oversimplification, said Will Hutton in The Observer. At present, we have arrangements allowing us to trade freely in goods and services with the world’s largest market. Leaving the EU and falling back on WTO terms ( see Briefing, page 11) would mean seriously hampering Britain’s ability to export lucrative services such as finance, consultancy and law – and severing manufacturing supply chains that reach across Europe. Our capacity to trade with the rest of the world would be “fatally undermined”.
Some 10,000 extra civil servants are at work in Whitehall planning for a “crash-out”, and they’re nowhere near ready, said Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. Luckily, MPS won’t let it happen: sanity will prevail. Doubtless a no deal would be serious for Britain, but the EU would find itself facing some pretty serious problems too, said Ambrose Evans-pritchard in The Daily Telegraph: a rupture in trade flows, lost access to the City of London, a crisis in Ireland. The EU is not remotely prepared for a cliff-edge divorce. Italy is in recession; France and Germany are teetering. If the EU refuses to budge during negotiations, I predict “that Europe itself will be engulfed in the maelstrom”.