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.
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.
This is exactly the kind of lose-win or lose-lose discussion that everyone (well 49 % of people) wanted to avoid. Asking who will profit from this or who will be on top is not relevant probably, because each side will lose now (at least in the short term) the question is just how big the losses will be. Also, bear in mind that the UK will not only have to rearrange its terms with the EU, but with more than 50 non-EU countries as well.
Leaving the economic impact aside, the societal and demographic implications are just as important (for me) and a very hard to predict. Great Britain might very well fall apart over this, as Scottish politicians already announced that they will push for a leave if the UK leaves the EU.
For me, this thing is just the biggest and most catastrophically failed political gamble of the century. Times are strange indeed.
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.
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)...
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.
This is looking less and less certain every day, not helped by the fact that the government has absolutely no idea what it wants or how to achieve it while increasing numbers of people point out that the "no deal" option results in total chaos: food shortages within a week etc.
The UK cannot afford to not have free trade with the EU, and a stipulation of free trade is to allow open immigration and travel. The main reason that many people even voted for leaving was to stop the EU immigration! So, just based on this 1 thing, it doesn't seem like it has a chance of happening.
Additionally, there is the whole thing about sending money to the NHS instead of the EU that turned out to be false.
And, many Leave voters actually didn't even want it to pass, they were just doing it as a protest vote.
So, half the stuff the Leave campaign said has turned out to be a lie and some portion (not really sure how big) of the voters didn't even want it to pass. Expecting the Brexit to happen just seems completely crazy.
The UK leaving with no deal would be the beginning of the end of the EU. There is already growing anti-EU sentiment in Italy (4th largest economy in the block), Hungary, Austria, Poland. The UK leaving could set off a chain reaction which would either end the EU project or drastically reduce its size.
The EU simply can't afford to have the UK leave completely, because any measure of success it might have as an independent nation will compel other members to take the idea seriously too.
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...
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"
I feel like, at this point, a possibly likely option is a continued bump of leave dates until the British population gets sick of the BS and forces a stay decision in like 20 years once the old racists go away - but my money is still on UK doing a no-deal brexit because they can't decide on anything else... that will probably happen during the next european recession when the EU gets sick of wasting bureaucratic effort on supporting the UK being silly... and it looks like we're 9-18 months out from the next global recession.
I don't believe for a second the UK is leaving the EU. It would be a huge disadvantage economically for them to do so.
All that talk is just political posturing to please the idiot wing of the conservative party.
(Disclaimer: I'm not from the UK however, so I'm just evaluating the situation from the outside)
The article concludes May will probably kick the problem into the long grass which she seems to be doing by saying it won't happen without Scottish agreement which probably won't happen.
That sort of assumes that the UK is all hunky dory after it leaves. If it gets slammed with an immediate recession/raising unemployment/etc... then that's leverage the EU has to convince other members to stay.
This seems speculative and it effectively posits a worst-of-all-worlds situation resulting - one if which the UK is half inside the single market.
Half inside such that it allows the flow of goods (the UK is a net importer) but not services (which we net export). This would be untenable, worse than a no-deal situation. And the basis of this speculation is that the EU is holding all the cards. I'm really not convinced this is true.
The article reads a little bit like a remain fantasy - Brexit will be a disaster and then people must come around to my way of thinking! The problem with that analysis is that in your way of thinking it was likely unimaginable that the Brexit vote would go through in the first place. And then we heard that no PM would ever actually action it, and then that no Parliament would allow it. None of which has really panned out.
--edit-- I'd love to reply to more of the comments below, but I appear to be rate-limited. Never mind then...
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.
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.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/britain-to-enter-recessio...
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.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2018/12/08/lettersthe-uk...
The CEO of the UK Major Ports Group says:
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?
In Bloomberg:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-19/u-k-port-...
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.
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