It’s not looking good. This may be the season of gifts and forgiveness and people wishing “Happy Christmas” to strangers, but it’s still not looking good. Because this may be the last Christmas of non-chaos, as March 29 2019 approaches.
Some say Theresa May is bluffing about no deal. That’s been her mantra since the start: no deal is better than a bad deal. She’s wrong, of course. Both would be bloody awful, but no deal would be super-bloody awful. But Theresa’s strategy is to convince the EU that’s she’s tough enough to handle a no-deal, and are you feeling lucky, punk?
Her hope is that the EU will say “This isn’t a bloody difficult woman, this is a crazy woman, let’s stop her going over the cliff-edge at all costs, not because we love her but because the damage wrought on us will be bad.”
Brexiteers like to enumerate the extent to which the EU wants to sell Britain German BMWs and French cheese and Belgian chocolate and all the rest. In other words, the EU is as liable to be damaged by a hard Brexit as is the UK. So it’s a bit like the cold war Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) policy: neither of us will use our nuclear weapons, because we’re both equally scared of the consequences.
Except it’s not just so neat. Why? Because there are 27 EU states and just one UK. (Resist the temptation to chant “There’s only one UK, there’s only one UK…”) . When Brexit hits the fan, the GDP of the UK is calculated to fall between £26 billion and £55 billion. The EU’s GDP combined would fall somewhere between £12 billion and £28 billion. And yes, Virginia, that means the GDP fall in the UK would be roughly twice that of the EU.
So yes indeed, nobody wants a hard Brexit. But should it come, John Bull is going to have a pain in his posterior twice as intense as that bothering Johnny Foreigner.
My advice: back away from that cliff-edge, John.
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