Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt will have to ditch no deal – or face an election

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/28/no-deal-brexit-boris-johnson-jeremy-hunt

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The Tory leadership bid has become a miniature general election on a single issue: no-deal Brexit. It is an election on the narrowest franchise since the 18th century. As a result it is being conducted like a public-school stunt, a sneer in the face of those who will be its principal victims. We don’t care what it costs, say Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, as the Treasury blows another £2bn preparing the country yet again for no deal. We are rich and can smash up the shop. We are the politics of the Oxford Bullingdon Club.

There was a time when even Nigel Farage was happy with “soft Brexit”. At the time of the 2016 referendum, there was no talk of a tariff wall in the Channel, rather a pledge now forgotten of “frictionless trade”. There was no demand for hard Brexit. The idea that no deal was better than a bad deal, coined by Theresa May two years ago, morphed into a rallying cry for the populist right. No deal has become the new machismo, though polls suggest barely a quarter of voters want it. Johnson says the chance of no deal by 31 October is “a million to one against”. Yet unless he plans something as yet unrevealed, this is rubbish. His hard Brexit is based on a legal fantasy, that under World Trade Organization rules you can have an agreement without a deal. The matter is not one of opinion but of law. Hunt, meanwhile, feels obliged to repeat May’s “no deal is better than a bad deal” mantra. This Dutch auction of chaos is cheered on by Tory party members.

At present crashing out of the customs union under WTO rules means there has to be a new border with the EU with customs checks. All planes, trains and lorries have to be certificated and checked for tariff liability and regulatory compliance. Travellers must have their movement validated and visas confirmed. Even on the most modest expectations, time-critical trade in farm produce, manufacturing parts and pharmaceuticals must suffer severely, along with tourism. The whole miserable panoply of border controls will have to be rushed into place, at enormous bureaucratic cost.

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Every indication now is that May’s withdrawal deal is the only conceivable way of achieving a 31 October Brexit. Johnson and Hunt are, of course, playing brinkmanship. They both actually voted for the deal in the Commons, and both know they must somehow revive it, however temporarily. But they believe their small band of voters like to see them walking tough, and believe a Trump-like intransigence will help get “a better deal” in Brussels. The risk in this seems recklessly high.

Throughout this eerie episode in British history, most Britons have assumed that, at some point, a god of finality, if not of sanity, would descend from the clouds and read the riot act. Last year parliament voted overwhelmingly to forestall no deal, but it failed to follow up with any enforcement, let along any agreed options. Its corridors and lobbies seem as gripped by fears, jealousies and vendettas as a Sicilian mafia. Johnson will not even rule out manipulating MPs into silence if they stand in the way of no deal. That was his “do or die”.

The justification for hard Brexit – leaving the customs union, exiting the single market, installing a new Irish border and all – was that the trading trauma in the short term would be worth the benefits in the long term. Britain would emerge a slim, lithe player on the world stage. Like the oil shock of 1973 and Thatcher’s austerity of 1980-81, a 40% tariff wall with Europe would do Britain good. Such disruption theory is much in vogue in management schools, so long as someone else suffers.

I have combed the literature of Brexit and found no shred of evidence that the gains of leaving Europe’s single economic area are worth the costs. There are no remotely compensating “trade deals with the rest of the world”. But at least hard Brexit provided for their negotiation. This week’s Tokyo talks on Britain joining a Pacific trading partnership imply months of negotiation for relatively trivial gains. The same goes for deals with countries such as India and Canada.

This is not what Johnson and Hunt seem ready to contemplate. They want hard Brexit with no deal. They want not disruption but senseless commercial self-flagellation, just to show how tough they are. They may dismiss the latest government no-deal forecast of a halving in Britain’s growth rate as scaremongering. Yet they do not hold “hustings” with those who know, with business, farming, medicine, science, recruitment, transport, tourism. For them to inflict such uncertainty and expense on others without remotely quantifiable benefit is beyond irresponsible.

If the winner next month does not briskly climb down and resurrect May’s deal, there will be a parliamentary crisis. The outcome is likely to be a demand from MPs either for a softer Brexit or for a new referendum. On present form, certainly Johnson and probably Hunt could not plausibly execute such a demand. The government of the day will be stranded. Parliament will have failed in its primary duty, to supply the country with stable government. It will surely have to be reelected.