Thread by @WanderinTeacake

1/ I've been thinking about this overnight, so sorry if it's a bit belated, but I have some problems with this article.

tl;dr I think it's both as bad as he says, and also worserer...
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

2/ First off, Mr Kibasi's argument that the long-term prognosis for the UK is very dismal is very probably right. The UK is likely to be haemorrhaging industries, money and jobs over an extended period, and the EU is going to be well-placed to take advantage.

3/ Mr. Kibasi is confident that no-deal is unlikely, in effect because it would be bad, ergo we won't do it.

But quite how bad it will be is poorly understood, and Parliament is near paralysed.

4/ And no-deal is the only outcome that requires no other action from that paralysed Parliament. Since Parliament cannot agree on any alternative, it is the one thing that can automatically happen.

5/ In the event there is no-deal, though, Mr Kibasi dismisses the concerns about short-term impacts as "hysterical." Reading between the lines, I think this is because he believes things will carry on much as before until somebody changes them.

6/ Presumably this is why he asserts - without explanation - there will be no troops deployed on the streets. He doesn't think there'll be a need.

7/ I don't think this is a realistic assessment of the no-deal scenario. Things are not going to carry on as before. Walk with me...

8/ It seems to me that a certain amount of reliance/hope is being placed, by people who care about these things and about what's going to happen, on the idea the EU is not going to just abandon the UK when this all inevitably goes wrong.

9/ Whether people think about it explicitly in these terms, I think the subtext is the EU might regard post-no-deal UK as a humanitarian crisis. This goes beyond "they need us because we buy stuff from them." It's more "you wouldn't abandon a friend in need, would you?"

10/ I think there is something in this idea. While Mr Kibasi doesn't express it in his article, I think it would implicity underpin what he believes would be the EU response to no-deal. They wouldn't just abandon us.

11/ It's there in the assumption of the creation of mini-deals, and in the "no trucks full of rotting food at Calais." For these things to happen, the EU would have to bite its tongue, break its own rules, and hold out a helping hand despite everything.

12/ (Again we find a description of a survivable no-deal scenario actually being one that describes deals being made, with no accounting for how the EU is being persuaded back to the table again to agree things piecemeal it wouldn't previously agree.)

13/ But there's two big problems with this, even assuming the EU is willing to do it.

14/ First is that it takes two sides acting in sanely and in good faith. Currently only one side - the EU - is doing this. The UK cannot decide what it wants or agree on a course of action for more than five minutes.

15/ The PM has spent the past two weeks ordering her party to torch the withdrawal deal she spent the previous two years negotiating, just so she could go back to the EU and tell them she's not asking for any more changes to it.

16/ To any dispassionate and independent observer, the UK Government is in its pursuit of Brexit deliberately, and with complete knowledge of the consequences, acting against the interests of its own people. It cannot be relied upon to act logically.

17/ Against that background, it's hard to feel confident that any post-no-deal mini-deals could get very far very fast, even before we consider how UK politicians are currently trying to be as unpleasant, boorish and intractable as they can to their EU counterparts.

18/ The second - bigger - problem with the article's dismissal of "hysterical" concerns about the no-deal environment stems (I think) from a too-shallow reading of how our trade arrangements work.

19/ Remember, rather than everything carrying on as before, the entire basis for trade is being ripped up. It's the non-tariff barriers and the practicailities that arise which will stack up to paralyse us.

20/ From a certain point of view, the stakes are higher for the EU in any decision they make about post-no-deal trade. The reason I say this is that since the UK will have no trade deals *at all* it will have no existing trade partners to piss off with its decisions.

21/ The EU, on the other hand, has to bear in mind that anything special it does for the UK as a third country is going to be watched carefully by every other one of its existing trade partners.

22/ And just because the UK is thinking of tearing up all rulebooks, from WTO upwards, it would be dangerous to assume the EU will do the same, just to save us from our own folly. It is keeping to the norms of international relations, not attempting to lower itself to our level.

23/ The lack of a common rule book and our departure from the EU courts may be overlooked for a short while, but not if the UK simply decides - as it is apparently considering - to remove border checks on imports.

24/ The EU won't want to be left helpless if they get flooded by dodgy goods imported using the UK as a staging point, for example.

25/ Mr Kibasi points out the EU has trade treaties with 40 other countries, which the UK must remake. To this must be added new deals for the EU27, making - in his reckoning - 67 deals just to stand still.

26/ I think this is in error. I think it's the same error David Davis made back in 2016 when he assured us we could do a quick deal with Germany on cars and Italy on... linguini or whatever it was he was wittering on about.

27/ Individual EU states don't do trade treaties, it's the EU as a bloc that does, so it's not 27 deals (or 31 if you count the other Single Market members) but one for the whole EU. But don't go breathing a sigh of relief...

28/ Because of the practicalities and non-tariff barriers. It's worse than having to redo 41 trade treaties....

29/ The late Paul McClean's superb investigation for the FT revealed 759 treaties that need to be redone after Brexit ft.com/content/f1435a…

30/ Many of these won't be trade treaties per se, but many of them will affect trade. To take an analogy, your recipe book will tell you how to make a particular dish. It may tell you that you need put the ingredients in the oven for 25 minutes at Gas Mark 5.

31/ But the recipe book won't tell you how to buy and fit your oven. It won't tell you how to use it or what Gas Mark 5 means, or how to measure 25 minutes. It's assumed you've got all this covered elsewhere. It assumes you have all the stuff you need that's not in the recipe.

32/ So a lot of those other 700-odd treaties are all those underlying instructions and rules. Without them you can't operate.

33/ The EU is unlikely to take itself into areas where it is left exposed, and particularly not since the UK has hinted it won't be bound by the existing court or arbitration processes if things go wrong.

34/ It leads to a lot of practical barriers. So when UK hauliers can no longer operate in the EU, because they're not licensed to do so, and EU operators don't have the immediate capacity to step in to replace them, that's a problem.

35/ When chemicals are restricted only to licensed recipients, but UK recipients don't have a licence, that's a problem. We're not just talking about shipments of acid or whatever here. Even the powdered form of vanilla essence is categorised as an explosive and so is restricted.

36/ What is being considered for Brexit is basically throwing all the pieces of a jigsaw up in the air, hoping they land in the right arrangement to make a picture. Or at least that we can make a picture out of the pieces that land on the table, and not too many go under the sofa

37/ Good will is not enough. Determination to make it work is not enough. You change enough factors all at once and it gets beyond the ability of anyone to be certain that something vital somewhere hasn't been missed.

38/ We're way beyond that point here. March 29th will profoundly affect pretty much every industry and every individual. If any one of a thousand unconsidered gotchas rears its head, we've got a big problem. That's why it's not "hysterical" to be concerned about this.