As the UK prime minister Boris Johnson pushes for a no-deal Brexit will lying about making progress at arriving at a deal with the EU, he has one thing going for him. Given how hellishly complicated the Brexit negotiations have been, the public may have the belief that the no-deal option is at least simple. You just walk away and wash your hands of the whole business.
But that is not true. No-deal does not mean no complications after the split.
Johnson’s latest rhetorical fancy – that, like the Incredible Hulk, the UK would break out of its “manacles” on 31 October – has further fuelled EU scepticism about his sincerity.
Describing the language as “not very surprising”, the EU source said: “It all makes it look like it’s a bit of a joke. We are talking about something extremely serious. The consequences of no deal will be extremely serious and it looks like this is being treated as a game in which you are the hero sort of story rather than [dealing] with real lives.”
Juncker said a no-deal Brexit would be a mess and take years to resolve. Speaking to Deutschlandfunk, he said patriots in the UK “would not wish your country such a fate”.
In fact, the government official who was closely involved with Brexit planning says things are going to take a long time to sort out.
But Rycroft, who was the most senior civil servant at DexEU until March this year, told the Guardian a no-deal Brexit would mark the beginning of a complex series of negotiations.
“It is not a clean break: what it does is it takes us legally out of the EU. But what it can’t do is undo all of the very close economic ties that we have with the EU, on which so much of our trade as a country depends. And nor would we want to undo all of the close security ties that we have with the EU,” he said.
“And because of the importance of those ties both for the EU and the UK, it will remain hugely important to have those expressed through a formal relationship. In other words, we’re going to have to negotiate – and that negotiation on the future relationship starts with citizens, money and the border on the island of Ireland.
“So the notion that no deal somehow means that we can turn our backs on the EU and break all our ties is just nonsensical.”
Meanwhie; the government was forced to release the Yellowhammer papers that contained contingency plans for what might happen with a no-deal and some of the worst case scenarios are quite dire.
A no-deal Brexit could result in rising food and fuel prices, disruption to medicine supplies and public disorder on Britain’s streets, according to secret documents the government was forced by MPs to publish on Wednesday.
A five-page document spelling out the government’s “planning assumptions” under Operation Yellowhammer – the government’s no-deal plan – was disclosed in response to a “humble address” motion.
Johnson seems to think he can lie his way through this mess, by just presenting a sunny face.
The plain fact seems to be that no one really knows what is going to happen.
Johnson seems to think that he can say one thing to us and another to the EU, as if ‘Johnny Foreigner can’t read our newspapers’. He also doesn’t seem to realise that how we behave in negotiations now will affect all of the negotiations for the wonderful trade deals we’re going to get when we’re fee of the EU /s
Not for BoJo or Gove or Rees-Mogg or Farage or whoever. Politics is one of the places where people can get away with what would be considered(and is!) outright fraud.
I’ve heard that lots of people have noted that the supposedly-randomly-chosen word Yellowhammer is an anagram for “Orwell Mayhem,” and wonder if that’s entirely a coincidence.
brucegee1962 @3: “Ream Em Wholly” works as well.
A very odd analogy from BoJo.
I haven’t kept up with my Marvel Comics reading in the last few years, but from what I recall, such negotiations almost always conclude in the same way: “HULK SMASH!!!”
Seems to be yet another thing that AB de PJ and Chump have in common