The more proximal cause of "not believing warnings about no-deal" is that there were very similar warnings for the Brexit vote itself, and approximately none of them came true.
Personally, I just can't see any big issues. Obviously UK's not going to ban the workers it needs or the imports it needs. Obviously other countries will still want to sell to a rich country like the UK. Sure, there might be a year or two of worse economic prospects as businesses and laws adjust, but really it's the long-term prospects that matter; and maybe it's better that UK unshackles itself to the EU which doesn't seem capable of thinking long-term and solving it's most pressing problems (democracy deficit, current account imbalances, immigration)...
Trade deals take years (if not decades?). The fact that we're only just out of the EU and we had a pandemic to take everyone's mind off the ball I'm not worried (yet) about the lack of trade deals. IMHO opinion people are too quick to shout "see Brexit is bad!", it's been 40 (?) years of EU membership - of course there's going to be issues whilst we untangle ourselves from the EU. None of what has happened so far is surprising.
Well, I'm kind of expecting that the no-deal scenario will actually happen. Then a big economic crisis will follow, making it palatable for politicians to actually endorse a new referendum. I'm not saying what the question in such referendum would be, though.
And actually, this is the reason why some remainers are voting no to the brexit deal, and it's not even a secret.
The big problem here is that no-deal Brexit is much worse than the status quo. We're basically threatening to inflict job losses on ourselves in the hopes that the job losses on the other side of the channel will drive negotiations.
Negotiations for a trade deal take years and the country will greatly suffer in the mean time as it is not prepared for a no deal scenario. The recent events with the traffic jam simulation or the ferry company without ferries are great examples of that. And that’s assuming that the trade deal negotiated with the EU after the departure would be more favourable than the one proposed today; the four freedoms come together, and it’s unlikely to change.
I would be curious to know about why the EU is in trouble; in my opinion the UK is, and massively. Brexiters have sold leaving the EU as the solution to a wide range of issues (housing, health, immigration, etc) and when people will realise all of this was extraordinarily optimistic (not to say, a lie), there will be a certain uprising and it won’t be pretty. We could also mention that the union is also at risk, from the non respect of the Belfast agreement to the fact that Scotland and Northern Ireland did not vote for Brexit: independence desires could loom again, and it could become very real very soon.
Every sensible organisation in this country have warned against a no deal and the catastrophic effect it would have. -8% GDP according to the government’s analysis. But yeah bloody remainers, the source of all misery...
Maybe this has nothing to do with Brexit, but more with energy prices and Tory tax cuts. As far as I know, not a single doomsaying Brexit prediction has come to pass.
You overlooked the much more likely third option: I don't believe these claims are true. Most people supporting no deal don't believe they're true, and for valid reasons!
Let's break it down.
Loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. This is an economic prediction so we can't know for sure if it would be true or not unless it really happens. But before the vote, this very same prediction was made in very similar form and turned out to be completely false.
Britain’s economy would be tipped into a year-long recession, with at least 500,000 jobs lost and GDP around 3.6% lower, following a vote to leave the EU, new Treasury analysis launched today by the Prime Minister and Chancellor shows.
NB: This analysis was about voting to Leave, not actually leaving, so we can test its correctness now. The analysis talks about the uncertainty created by two years of negotiations, saying it would destroy at best 500,000 jobs and at worst 800,000 jobs. Leave won, there have been 3.5 years of uncertainty and the economy is performing incredibly well. Employment has grown strongly since the vote. This prediction posed as scientific fact, but was riven with huge Remain bias and turned out to be nonsense.
So now the same people are making the same claim again, but won't explain why this time they're right or what they learned from their previous failure. It's entirely reasonable to assume they've learned nothing, are making these claims for political reasons and will be wrong again.
OK, now, colossal disruption. Possible interruptions to food and medical supplies.
Really?
The explanation for why such disruption would happen goes like this. The UK will implement more customs checks, which would be slow and temporarily overwhelm customs infrastructure, leading to supply chain disruptions and disasters.
Two problems with this claim.
Firstly, why would any sane government insist on customs checks if people were dying due to lack of medicine or food? Tariff income isn't that important and on day one the precise rules will be the same anyway. It'd be much more sensible to just relax customs checks to whatever level was needed to ensure continuity of supply until enough infrastructure was built.
Secondly and more importantly, people who actually run ports are saying the infrastructure is already built and it's not true that there'd be large disruptions in case of no deal.
I write on behalf of the United Kingdom’s major port operators, responsible for handling 75 per cent of the country’s seaborne trade. Dover, handling around 6 per cent of UK port volumes, faces a unique combination of Brexit risk factors that are not faced by most major UK ports. These ports already have the capacity and infrastructure to handle large volumes of both EU and non-EU trade today without logjam.
So apparently the people running the ports think only Dover might have issues, but if it gets overloaded traffic would just go elsewhere. What does the head of Dover Port think about this?
The Port of Dover -- through which a sixth of the U.K.’s trade in goods flows -- can cope with any disruption thrown up by a no-deal Brexit, Chief Executive Officer Doug Bannister said, suggesting some of the direr predictions of chaos are wide of the mark.
So people who run ports are saying this is just politically driven scaremongering.
As for medicines, if you look at the NHS advice page, it says the extent of their plans is hiring additional space on planes or ferries to handle temporary transport disruption (which, remember, port operators are saying won't actually be an issue): https://www.england.nhs.uk/eu-exit/medicines/medicines-faq/
So the claims being made here to try and terrify the British population into giving up on Brexit, it's all stuff we heard before or people outside of the establishment are saying isn't true.
This is ridiculous Brexiteer fantasy. The UK will have no measure of success in the short to medium term in a no deal scenario; it will be absolutely catastrophic.
It's meaningless to speculate what might happen in a fantasy scenario a decade or more later, but we know for a fact that the UK would be initially hurt much more badly by no deal than the EU.
If anything, no deal should convince Eurosceptics in other countries that they just cannot sell this fantasy to their constituents anymore.
Even if the UK just get a bad deal, it might have some real hard consequences. UK will adapt, whatever happen, but adaptation takes time. In this time of adaptation, the short term consequences of the "bad deal" might still yield some really bad results.
I mainly think of layoff in company that highly rely on the trade agreement with the EU to sustain their business.
An augmentation of unemployment combined with a possible devaluation of the money and an increasing inflation due to new importation taxes on basic needs items (food medicine, ...) could have some disastrous consequences on the lower and middle classes.
It could convince Scottland, which already struggle with poverty and voted against the Brexit (62%), to separate from the UK and try to join the EU (the last referendum was "only" 55% against leaving the UK). This might create even more trouble.
It is likely that a bad deal might yield enough difficult short term consequences to spiral out of control. A strong political leadership will be needed to handle them before they do. And currently, it is not unrealistic to say that no parties are ready to handle them.
When no-deal looks as appeling as the deals being offered, this was an eventuality. I think many knew this going in. I doubt, however, that this is purely due to foot-dragging by the current government, and more to do with some hard-won lack of trust on both sides of the negotiating table. Both the UK and the EU made some unfortunte moves, shady deals, and asinine assertions, in the brexit adventure that will likely poison the well for years to come. Until a compelling (military or financial) reason comes along, I expect the situation to mostly remain the same.
I fail to see the "bombshell" here. This is what everyone expected when leaving the EU single market.
The only bombshell would be if the UK negotiators managed to prevent a hard Brexit. Given the current track record of their leading political party, this seems unlikely.
Eventually it probably will (brexiters seem to think in 25 / 50 years time, which is apparently a good price to pay for Brexit...).
However, the UK will lose the huge amount of influence it has at the moment on the world stage, will be pressured by bigger economies to accept unfavorable trade deals and deregulation (US food standards, VISAs, etc) and its manufacturing will be severely damaged; it could possibly collapse entirely. The irony is that this will likely create a wave of unemployment in the very regions that voted in favour of Brexit.
But regardless of the consequences, if you think people voted for a "no deal" when they voted Brexit, you are deluded. Let's illustrate my point with a few quotes:
"The free trade agreement that we will ahve to do with the European Union should be one of the easiest in human history" - Liam Fox - 2017
"Getting out of the EU can be quick and easy - the UK holds most of the cards in any negotiation" - John Redwood - 2016
"Within minutes of a vote for Brexit, CEO's would be knocking down Chancellor Merkel's door demanding access to the British market" - David Davis 2016
“It is also true that the single market is of considerable value to many UK companies and consumers, and that leaving would cause at least some business uncertainty, while embroiling the Government for several years in a fiddly process of negotiating new arrangements, so diverting energy from the real problems of this country – low skills, low social mobility, low investment etc – that have nothing to do with Europe.” - Boris Johnson 2016
As you can see, no deal is far from the position that was pushed to the people, even after the vote had occurred. Saying people voted for a "no deal" because they voted for Brexit is disingenuous. Long gone is the time of "Having our cake and eat it"
Sure, what could possibly go wrong with a radical decision taken by a narrow majority, with a significant part of the voters that supported it having racist motivations (even if the concept of Brexit itself is not racist), others motivated by lies (millions to the NHS et al) and the vast majority of economists describing it as a shoot in the foot?
I don't think it will be "doomsday" either, but I think believing that things won't go downwards is an exercise in self-fooling.
Unfortunately, “no deal” is looking increasingly likely. While UK rhetoric appears to still be “[The EU] needs us more than we need them”, the EU’s responses have consistently been otherwise.
This may be related to the observation that the UK’s goals and red-lines (when taken together rather than separately) are incompatible with WTO rules.
Meanwhile there have been several conservative speeches in Parliament about the direction they want:
They want May to come up with a better plan for a "No deal" Brexit. To take a much harder stance against the EU in negotiations. THAT's why they voted against her.
I feel like this is going in a VERY different direction than is being implied in the comments here.
And let's be honest here: it might work. In the EU, in all countries where I can understand the language: France, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands there are artikels on the front page of the main newspaper about companies lobbying to force their governments to simply break ranks with the EU in case of "No deal": to have a trade pact with the UK ready to go March 29. In theory, that's not legal, but there is precedent. If the UK can get trade deals with the US (which is not going to be a problem), Ireland, Belgium, France and the Netherlands, the damage of a no deal Brexit will be limited quite a bit. A "fuck the lot of you. No deal !" approach ... it's not out of the question that they actually make it work.
Plus, you know, it's clearly what the majority of the voters want and in theory both the UK and these European countries are democracies. On would think that would make it simple.
And then there's the question of what happens if Juncker gets called on his bluff. AFD, 5*, Lega Nord and FN will certainly see their hand strengthened quite a bit if the UK blows up their EU membership and actually gets away with it. Talk about worst possible outcome for everyone.
The EU should say "ok ... voters decided, sucks, but let's make this work. Let's give the UK a fair exit and a fair trade deal". That is in the interest of everyone in the EU AND everyone in the UK ... with the notable exception of the EU politicians themselves.
Personally, I just can't see any big issues. Obviously UK's not going to ban the workers it needs or the imports it needs. Obviously other countries will still want to sell to a rich country like the UK. Sure, there might be a year or two of worse economic prospects as businesses and laws adjust, but really it's the long-term prospects that matter; and maybe it's better that UK unshackles itself to the EU which doesn't seem capable of thinking long-term and solving it's most pressing problems (democracy deficit, current account imbalances, immigration)...
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