A thread on how a columnist can believe three impossible things before breakfast and force words to mean whatever he wants them to mean while complaining about the “through-the-looking-glass world of Brexit”. 1/
So The @spectator’s @mattlynnwriter wrote a column where he argues costs of exiting the EU’s single market without a deal are “mostly one-off costs, involving extra admin and paperwork, rerouted supply chains and so on. Once it is done it is done”. How can anyone believe this? 2/
The point of the author’s reasoning is to refute the “myth” of a Brexit cliff edge and argue that most of the pressure on the UK will “evaporate” as the deadline for Brexit approaches without a deal. So that’s already three impossible things to believe in. Let’s see why. 3/
Are costs of doing business with the EU single market after a no deal Brexit really one-off? No, unless “one-off” has now had its meaning humpty-dumptily changed to “once per item exported in each transaction”, i.e., the exact opposite of what “one-off” is supposed to mean. 4/
How can the rerouting of a supply chain, for instance, ever be considered a one-off cost? If the new supply chain route is more expensive than before a no-deal Brexit, it will clearly be a recurring cost (if it’s not, you could probably have used it before Brexit). 5/
The same applies to admin and paperwork costs. Without a deal, paperwork needs to be filed in every instance of exporting something to the EU-EEA single market; clearly not a one-off cost. 6/
(The point of the single market being that all intra-EU/EAA transactions get treated as if they occurred in a single country, if you exit you necessarily reintroduce paperwork. With a deal you could minimize this; without a deal the paperwork and its costs will be permanent) 7/
And this is the first and main argument the author uses to prove that the pressure on the UK “will evaporate” as Brexit without a deal nears. A point that nobody reasonable is making, and for good reason. 8/
His second point is that UK businesses are better prepared to face a no deal Brexit than EU businesses. He doesn’t offer any empirical basis for that allegation, nor does he allow for the fact that UK businesses need to prepare for a disruption in trade with 27 countries... 9/
...whereas EU businesses will have to prepare for a disruption of trade with one country, and will still be able to trade with 26 other EU countries, plus EEA, plus all the other countries that have agreements with the EU. 10/
Anyway, the author’s contention is just a new version of the “they need us more than we need them” argument that brexiters have expounded since before 2016 to justify the belief that a deal with EU should be “one of the easiest in history” to get. Wrong then, wrong now. 11/
The author argues that, since the pressure on the UK will “evaporate” and EU business are less prepared for Brexit, “come April 2” of next year the EU will knock at the UK’s door to beg for sectorial “side deals”. 12/
The idea of sectorial trade deals is a long-standing illusion of brexiters (David Davis: “a UK-German deal would include free access for their cars and industrial goods, in exchange for a deal on everything else.”) which ignores that the EU negotiates trade as a single bloc 13/
Now, as an apocalyptic sect continually postponing the end of the world, the same illusion just gets advanced to April 2, 2019. Apparently the EU would just need three days after Brexit-day next March 29 to despair and beg for the deals it is emphatically not negotiating now. 14/
(Which, by the way, undercuts the argument that all will be fine for the UK without a deal; actually, all will be fine because there will be a deal. The EU will beg for it 3 days after the UK has crashed out of the single market and the UK will hold all the cards *then*.) 15/
You can choose to believe in that, and maybe that’s the case with the article’s author. 16/
The other possible explanation is that some no-deal Brexiteers now do not believe a no-deal Brexit will happen, which frees them to imagine whatever impossible or magic attributes they wish no-deal Brexit to have, such as: 17/
pressure on the UK “evaporating” as Brexit nears, the EU begging for deals after three days, you name it. If no-deal Brexit isn’t happening, you can say whatever you want about what would happen in a no-deal scenario. 18/
The problem, as with everything Brexit-related, is that a god with a sense of humour may be watching from above and decide to grant no-deal Brexiteers what they say they wish for. 19/
Presumably on that dat nobody will remember to unearth the Spectator article where a no-deal Brexit with mainly one-off costs for the UK and an EU desperately begging for side-deals after three days was promised to them. /finis
