Thread by @mac_puck

Morning @chrisgreybrexit .
Do you remember how various brexit watchers said in December 2020 that the deal, thin as it was, would avoid yellowhammer? The frog would be boiled not run over. You described a slow puncture; I suggested occult bleeding.

1/

https://twitter.com/mac_puck/status/1338978433020420099?s=20

Hmm. The last few weeks are looking a lot more like Yellowhammer after all! Was the deal thinner than we thought? Was the UK even less prepared / more mismanaged than we thought?

I reckon it's Covid. I reckon before Covid we were looking at Brexit reducing *inflow of workers

2/

We would get 150K fewer young, hardworking Poles, Romanians etc, every year and after 10 years our economy would be 1.5M short. But Covid created a >1M *outflow*, effectively overnight.

And this turned your slow puncture into a 90mph blow-out.

3/

thenationalnews.com/world/europe/p…

But at the same time the Covid lockdowns concealed for a while the lack of HGV drivers, Hospitality workers, Warehousemen and even care workers ( I imagine providers were too close to the eye of the storm to separate EU staff crisis from funding crisis from Covid crisis.)

4/

I reckon the more cynical Tories
- Johnson, Gove, Frost - secretly saw Covid as a gift from the Gods of Brexit - perfect smokescreen to conceal brexit disruption. (And Boris refusing the Sept "circuit breaker", then "saving Xmas" basically dialed-in a lockdown for Jan 2021)

5/

But the Brexit Gods are capricious; the "perfect smokescreen" has morphed into the complete opposite. It is now throwing into stark relief the carnage that Brexit would have much more slowly wreaked without Covid.

6/

It has squeezed 10 years of labour shortages into 10 months and created a hill of borrowing which limits HMG's ability to soften the Brexit blow with more borrowing going forward.

Still, by turning a chronic problem into an acute one, just maybe the patient will wake up?

7/7