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Leading Eurosceptic Christopher Booker writing in the Telegraph.
Ever since January last year, this column has had one persistent theme. When would the British people finally wake up to the potentially catastrophic consequences of the dramatic shift in Theresa May’s Brexit strategy revealed in her Lancaster House speech? Until then, it was reasonable to believe her repeated insistence that she wanted Britain, on leaving the EU, to continue enjoying “frictionless” trade “within” our largest export market. And the only practical way to do this would have been to join the European Free Trade Association (Efta) and thus remain in the European Economic Area (EEA).
But as soon as Mrs May slammed the door on this, it became clear that neither she nor her ministers had any real understanding of what it would mean for Britain to shut itself out entirely from the EU’s trading system, to become what it terms a “third country”. They clearly had no idea of how enmeshed our economy had become with that of the EU or how complex it would be to disengage from it. All we saw instead was our Government completely out of its depth, lost in one bubble of wishful thinking after another, of which Mrs May’s absurd “Chequers plan” is merely the latest.
Only now, after 16 months of talking ineffectually around the subject, has our Government come out with the first tranche of 80-odd papers to explain how we should prepare for the consequences of leaving the EU without a deal.
These tell us nothing more than what should have been obvious back in the days when Mrs May was still claiming “no deal is better than a bad deal”; and for detail and clarity they are not a patch on the 68 “Notices to Stakeholders” already issued by the European Commission to spell out the consequences of Britain choosing to become a “third country”. Yet even now, so poorly understood on this side of the Channel have been the implications of our leaving without a deal that this ragbag of papers has widely come as quite a shock, despite being airily brushed aside by the Brexiteers as another instalment of “Project Fear”. The ultimate irony is that what we are facing is not so much a “no deal” as the need for dozens of “side deals”, to be hastily scrambled together in the few months remaining, to keep sizeable parts of our economic activity functioning. And many of the most serious issues have not yet been addressed, such as how legally we are going to be able to keep our airports open and our aircraft flying outside UK airspace (let alone that intractable riddle of how to keep an open border in Northern Ireland).
The bottom line is that we are putting at risk a substantial chunk of our export trade with the EU worth £270 billion a year, or 14 per cent of our GDP, with all the implications for lost jobs, businesses and tax revenue that carries with it. Yet, tragically, without Mrs May’s fateful wrong turning in January last year, so much of this chaos could easily have been avoided.
