Yellowhammer warnings were known before we voted Brexit

THE warnings contained in Operation Yellowhammer may be, as the Government claimed yesterday “a worst case scenario...” But even allowing for a little bit of embellishment compared to what’s really in store, they still make for pretty scary reading. We used to scoff at those apparently crazy survivalists who kept a fully fuelled-up 4x4 on the drive ready to flee Armageddon or a cellar packed with dried food and tins of beans alongside their NBC suit and respirator – now they don’t seem quite so ludicrous.

But it doesn’t take much research to realise that none of these warnings should come as any great surprise. When Britain went to the polls on June 23 2016 the risks of voting to leave the European Union had all been spelled out in great and alarming detail. No one can have been unaware of what might befall the nation if we they to vote leave – but a majority still did just that.

Of course most of the warnings came from the remain side. Leavers, including Boris Johnson put a positive gloss on the impact of breaking away from the EU, promising a straightforward deal with Brussels that would, for the most part, preserve all of the benefits we currently enjoy. But to suggest that was the only story being peddled, would be incorrect. Even ardent leavers knew there was another narrative.

We are still, of course, in the world of predictions, rather than reality. And those who warned that the chaos would start the morning after a vote to leave have been proved largely wrong. While the uncertainty of three years of waiting for Brexit has certainly taken its toll, the British economy remains bouyant, employment levels are high and most people have been largely unaffected, in the pocket at least, by Brexit and its ramifications.

That could all change, of course. And the fact that the song of the yellowhammer, a farmland bird in serious decline, is characterised as sounding like “a little bit of bread and no cheese” might mean the name is more than just a coincidence. Food shortages are among the warnings given.

The Government remains confident that the predictions in the document, which ministers had initially hoped to keep secret, won’t come to pass. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace told the BBC that the potential problems would become a reality only if the Government did not prepare. “That is why we are doing things about it,” he said. “That is why the Chancellor opened his cheque book, that’s why we are spending the money on doing lots of things to mitigate those assumptions.”

And there are also still hopes – although they are fading fast – that a deal might be done before October 31. It is also possible the Prime Minister might be unable to find a way to circumvent Parliament’s legislation to keep us in the EU until the end of January. That would, at the very least, delay the problem.

It is extraordinary that a peacetime government should have to undertake the measures they are apparently taking to avoid a national catastrophe. Remainers will see it as an admission of all that’s wrong with a no deal Brexit. Leavers believe it to be a price worth paying. That’s how divided we have become.