How do right-wing Brexiters know that "no deal is better than a bad deal"?

Ever since Theresa May's woeful January 17th clown costume speech Brexiters have been gleefully repeating her soundbite that "no deal is better than a bad deal" as if her threat-based posturing is some kind of genius negotiating stance, rather than an unforgivably reckless gamble with the entire economic future of the UK.

On March 15th the Brexit minister David Davis made an incredible admission, one that very few people seem to have realised the appalling significance of. What he admitted is that despite stalling for month after tedious month while they tried to cobble together some kind of Brexit plan, the Tories carried out no impact assessment into the potential social and economic damage of walking away from the Brexit negotiations with no deal in place.

The significance of this admission of course is that Theresa May (and all of the Brexiters who have rote learned and repeated her glib platitude) has no authority whatever to claim that "no deal is better than a bad deal" because there has been no effort whatever to establish how bad a "no deal" situation would actually be for the UK.

In light of the fact that Theresa May's government made absolutely no effort to establish how much social and economic devastation they would cause by resorting to a retaliatory nuclear Brexit, it's an extraordinarily reckless gamble to make the threat of nuclear Brexit the absolute cornerstone of their so-called "negotiating strategy".

In reality it's beyond obvious that the UK is going to be offered a "bad deal". There's absolutely no way that the 27 remaining EU states would offer a better deal to the member that quit their club than the deal the departing member had before. Anyone who thinks otherwise is clearly and undeniably suffering a reality-denying refusal to accept the absolute basics of the geopolitical situation the UK is in.

The issue isn't whether the UK gets offered a "bad deal", because anything better than what the UK had before is the stuff of Brexiter fantasyland imaginings. The issue is how on earth anyone can claim that "no deal" is better than the "bad deal" that will be on offer when it's clear that the Tory government negligently refused to investigate how ruinous "no deal" would actually be before they decided to use it as a threat.

It was bad enough that after six tedious months of waiting for it, the Tory "negotiation strategy" that Theresa May announced in her clown costume speech was nothing more than "do as we say or we'll blow up an economic bomb and then you'll be sorry", but now it's absolutely clear that they didn't even bother to investigate how big the economic bomb is, nor whether the explosion would actually do more damage to the UK than to the EU!

So next time you hear some Brexiter mindlessly repeating Theresa May's "No deal is better than a bad deal" platitude, the question you need to ask them is how Theresa May actually knows that "no deal" is better when she arrogantly refused to do any research whatever into how bad the thing she's threatening would actually be for Britain.

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