It has long been clear that crashing out of the EU with no deal would be crazy. Now officials in David Davis’ Brexit department have drawn up scenarios for a no-deal Brexit – a mild one, a severe one and one dubbed “Armageddon”.
Details have been leaked to the Sunday Times by civil servants worried that Brexiters still think walking away from negotiations is an option. One official told the paper the scenarios were so explosive they were “locked in a safe”.
The UK would suffer “shortages of medicine, fuel and food within a fortnight”, according to the Doomsday scenario prepared by civil servants. Even their second-best scenario shows the Port of Dover collapsing on “day one” after crashing out.
The government’s plan to avoid this by throwing open the UK’s trade borders would only work if EU countries like France did the same. “If, for whatever reason, Europe decides to slow that supply down, then we’re screwed,” one senior official told the Sunday Times.
The government insists that “none of this would come to pass”. But with many Brexiters still touting no deal as a genuine option, it cannot be ruled out.
What’s more, no deal would be even worse than the problems mentioned in the Sunday Times leak. Here are 8 more issues.
1. Planes grounded
Flights between the EU and UK could be grounded. Airports and airlines are worried – even the chancellor has admitted it’s “theoretically conceivable”. This is because UK would lose access to Europe’s Open Skies agreement, which sets the rules for the aviation industry.
2. Citizens’ rights up in the air
Three million EU citizens in the UK and a million Brits on the continent would see their rights disappear overnight. Expect an exodus of nurses, doctors, construction workers, fruit pickers, restaurant staff, financiers, entrepreneurs… leading to staff shortages and fewer taxes to spend on things like the NHS.
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Click here to find out more3. Fighting terrorism
The government wants to keep working with the EU to tackle cross-border terrorism and crime post Brexit. That’s proving hard enough within the framework of the withdrawal agreement. But without a deal, there won’t be any legal basis to do this.
4. Ireland chaos
Products such as Guinness criss-cross the Irish border several times during the manufacturing process. Each crossing would face delays and customs fees. And what of people who cross the border to work or communities that share hospitals? The peace process has been working well in Ireland over the past 20 years – but a border breakdown would stoke tensions between nationalists and unionists.
5. Golden opportunity for SNP
Nicola Sturgeon rebooted the SNP’s efforts to reignite the independence debate last month. A catastrophic Brexit which Scots didn’t vote for would speed things up considerably, potentially destroying the 300-year union between England and Scotland.
6. Regulatory minefield
Medicines, chemicals, food standards, banking, nuclear energy, maritime safety, police cooperation… So much of our lives is regulated by a network of dedicated EU agencies. We’d drop out of all of them with no deal. Many industries will struggle to function until new agreements are in place.
7. Trade turmoil
The UK won’t just crash out of the EU’s single market. We’ll also lose the free trade agreements the EU has with 66 other countries from Canada and Mexico to Switzerland and South Korea. That would further clobber the economy.
8. Dangerous world
We work side by side with our EU partners to tackle global threats: imposing sanctions against Russia for its occupation of Crimea, fighting people smugglers off the coast of Africa and so forth. Even Europe’s closest ally, the US, is kickstarting a trade war with us. The government wants to keep standing alongside other European powers. But if the EU is pursuing us through the courts for tens of billions of pounds it says we owe, how easy will that be?
This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared in March 2017
