The words are pitched to sound dryly unthreatening in a thick pea soup of technical detail – but the effect is all the more hair-raising. Brexit secretary Dominic Raab launched the first of the government’s “technical notices” on Thursday, explaining how to prepare for Brexit in the event of no-deal with the EU, but was greeted with a renewed chorus of panic from the CBI, the TUC, farmers, NHS, financiers – all but those blinded by Brexitmania.
Raab was eager to pretend these 24 documents would have little effect on ordinary people. “These are for business,” he said, sounding like Harold Wilson making his notorious reassurance that “the pound in your pocket has not been devalued”. But the notices make clear that if no deal is reached by the time we leave on 29 March 2019, the UK faces a mountain of crisis, wrapped in burgeoning blankets of new bureaucracy. Look what businesses need to do: as well as customs declarations for goods from the EU, they must employ customs brokers, freight forwarders and logistics providers with all necessary software and authorisations. Each must register for a UK Economic Operator Registration and Identification number, with higher costs and slower processing times for euro transactions. And yes, there will be new tariffs.
This hardly encourages all those businesses Liam Fox urges to start exporting. Nor will it “only” affect business when lorries are backed halfway up Britain. Add in 1,000 extra border staff and 9,000 extra civil servants, and where is that bonfire of red tape the Brexiters promised?
However carefully Raab tries to cotton-wool these warnings, today brought an avalanche of reminders of the dire Brexit effects we have already been told about. Supermarket CEOs say shelves will be emptied as a third of food is imported from the EU. Health secretary Matt Hancock tells drug companies to stockpile an extra six weeks’ worth of drugs – but warns hospitals and patients not to panic-buy, for fear of running short. The City is rumbling with Brexit warnings amid movements to other EU capitals. The 300,000 expat pensioners living in Europe are warned that no deal may threaten their pensions and healthcare. Even small parcels from the EU will incur VAT, and credit card charges will rise for visitors to the EU. Police warn of the risk of losing data exchanges on EU crime. Who knew until these notices that no deal means a stoppage of Danish sperm bank donations? Jacob Rees-Mogg calls all this “absurdly overstated”, yet Raab has admitted that even “no deal” needs basic agreement on ports, banking, data – or disaster follows. Naturally, Northern Ireland’s border remains unresolved. Traders must consult Dublin. “We will provide more information in due course.” Ah! We are still full steam ahead for the Irish iceberg on which Boris Johnson’s “titanic success of Brexit” will founder.
Raab is treading a wobbling tightrope. Believe it or not, he like Jeremy Hunt is a Tory leadership supplicant, he an original leaver, Hunt an erstwhile remainer, both now zigzagging. All they say is refracted through the distorting mirror of pleasing the tiny band of decrepit Tory party members. So zigzag Raab promises no change to worker rights, yet hastens to add that regulations will “diverge over time”, “when it’s right for the British people”. On the one hand they both want to sound prime ministerially pragmatic, unlike the irresponsible madcap fanatic Johnson. They want to bring home the Brexit bacon – even if Danish is off the menu – with a deal to satisfy the mouth-foamers, without causing economic cataclysm. This, as Theresa May now knows, is impossible.
That impossibilism is now becoming clearer to most voters. The more ministers parrot May’s nonsensical claim that “no deal is better than a bad deal”, the more obvious it becomes that every brand of Brexit deal is far worse than no Brexit.
By more than three to one, people now think Brexit talks will not end well. The Guardian/ICM poll finds a great shift among leave and Tory voters. Meanwhile, a YouGov poll of the north-east found a startling change in attitudes among Labour voters, shifting from 59% for Brexit to 68% for remain. This region voted leave by a 16-point margin, but is now 50:50, favouring a new vote on the deal.
Why this change of mind? The Brexit threat has been hammered home by the misjudgment of the Brexiters themselves. It was they who demanded the government publish plans for “no deal” damage limitation, as proof to the enemy across the Channel that Britain can go it alone. But as soon as the government started laying plans out, Brexiters cried foul: the mandarins are launching Project Fear again! There’s no pleasing these insatiables – and there never will be. Because every Brexit outcome will be bad, they will always need to blame the betrayers, the appeasers and she who the ranters call Treason May.
As a tactic, Brexiters have reprised the cold war dilemma. When nuclear policy depends on the principle of mutually assured destruction, it has to be unthinkable to both sides that anyone would ever press the button. Yet at the same time, the other side must believe you just might. In 1980, as Russia was invading Afghanistan, the government sabre-rattled by publishing civil defence leaflets telling citizens how to prepare for a nuclear war: what to do when the warnings sound, how to construct a fallout shelter or a fallout room, what food and water you need for 14 days and what makeshift toilet arrangements. It didn’t frighten the Russians but it terrified enough citizens here into a great CND revival.
No one suggests the cataclysm of Brexit compares to nuclear annihilation – but the tactical thinking is the same. In trying to frighten the enemy, all the Brexiters have done is terrify their own side. People are at last hearing the news of what no deal – and indeed almost any kind of Brexit – will really mean for everyday life, rather than the sunlit promised land of Brexlandia. Even Rees-Mogg has admitted we may not reach that place for half a century.